#455 – AI vs. Tariffs vs. Global Supply Chains: The New Rules of the E-commerce Game with Bernie Thompson
E-commerce enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, you’re in for a treat as we sit down with Bernie Thompson, a pioneering eight-figure Amazon seller and former software engineer with industry giants like IBM and Microsoft. Bernie charts a thrilling journey from his tech roots to establishing a successful electronics company in the early days of Amazon’s marketplace. Our conversation unveils the seismic shifts in the e-commerce landscape, where timing, innovation, and an adaptable mindset are key to thriving amid intense global competition.
We’re not shying away from the hard-hitting challenges Western sellers face, particularly in the electronics sector. Bernie opens up about navigating the choppy waters of tariffs and fierce competition from aggressive Chinese brands. Misleading product claims and the difficulty of enforcing regulations in this digital age add another layer of complexity. Through it all, Bernie underscores the vital role of strategic planning and intellectual property protection as pillars for sustaining growth and innovation.
As we wrap up, we cast an eye on the future, spotlighting the transformative power of AI in product development and global business competitiveness. From scaling operations with AI-driven tools to the need for systemic changes in American manufacturing, our discussion highlights the strategic moves necessary to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving global market. Join us for an episode brimming with insights, whether you’re an industry veteran or a curious newcomer eager to understand the forces reshaping e-commerce and manufacturing today.
In episode 455 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Bernie discuss:
- 00:00 – E-Commerce Innovations With Bernie Thompson
- 03:06 – Fortunate Timing for Amazon Seller
- 08:59 – Navigating Tariff Challenges in the Electronics Category
- 11:35 – Rise of Chinese Brands in Electronics
- 20:32 – Challenges of Western Electronics Industry
- 25:31 – Challenges in Opening Chip Plant
- 26:57 – Strategies for American Manufacturing Competitiveness
- 31:08 – Navigating Global Electronics Manufacturing
- 32:04 – Technological Innovations and Global Competition
- 36:29 – Intellectual Property and Sourcing Strategy
- 43:56 – Manufacturing Support Discrepancy Between Countries
- 47:01 – Labor and Automation in China
- 52:20 – Impact of AI on Product Development
- 53:20 – Cultural and Mental Shifts in Business
- 58:00 – The Power of AI in Business
- 1:02:26 – Strategic Implementation of AI in Business
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 455 of the AM/PM podcast. This episode is one that I think you’re going to want to listen to, maybe even twice, and probably come back and revisit in about two, three years’ time and see how accurate this is. I’m speaking with Bernie Thompson today. Bernie is an eight-figure seller. Been involved in selling e-commerce since 2009, so about 16 years now. We talk about the challenges and what’s happening when it comes to actually manufacturing in China or anywhere else in the world, some of the challenges with playing by the rules and who’s not playing by the rules, and how AI is going to affect everything that we’re doing, from manufacturing to logistics to selling. I think there’s a lot of really good things you’re going to be able to take away from this episode and some deep thought that you’re going to get into. So please enjoy this episode with Mr. Bernie Thompson. Mr. Bernie Thompson, one of the OGs on the AM/PM podcast. Good to see you again, man.
Bernie:
Hey, it’s so great to see you, Kevin. We’ve seen each other a few times lately. You run so many great shows, great conferences for sellers to learn stuff, and I’m out there trying to learn at the same time. You know, I’m glad to be here on the show, hoping to share too.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I remember, I think, the first time I met you I think it might’ve been when, I think it was in Seattle at one of Steve Simonson’s events. You were up there and he’s like there’s this, there’s this eight-figure seller His name is Bernie Thompson runs this company. I was like, ooh, I never shook the hand of an eight-figure guy. Was it at that event or was it somewhere else?
Bernie:
Actually, I think, Kevin, it was in Global Sources out in Hong Kong. You and I were both speaking back in, I don’t know, 2016 or 2017 or something like that.
Kevin King:
Oh yeah, okay, that’s where. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that’s where it was.
Bernie:
Okay, I was blown away.
Kevin King:
Then I got to know you a little bit better. I think at one of Steve’s events or something up in Seattle. Yeah, I just remember some event in Seattle where you came in and you’re like the big guy in the room, you know the big kahuna, the big seller, the big fish in the room and I was like, oh, this is pretty cool, it’s Bernie from Plugable. And you had some girl at the time just doing some PPC for you that turns out to be one of the smartest people in the entire ecosystem and has gone on to do big things. So, you got the start. So, when did you start selling? What year was that? It was like a day or two ago.
Bernie:
Right, yeah, it was a little while ago, it was 2009. You know, very first FBA warehouse that opened up Reno One and I actually was thought I was just starting an electronics company and then, the way the timing worked out, you know it was really perfect timing for the rise of Amazon and just generally the rise of e-commerce and ease of building a brand. Because, you know, just prior to this, you know I would have had to go to, you know, to start electronics brand. You know, go up to North Dakota, go down to Bentonville, Arkansas, and you know, kind of beg in front of a sales organization or a purchasing organization to try to get some kind of new brand, new products, some shelf space, and so this kind of infinite shelf space, plus FBA, plus all the momentum that Amazon eventually developed. It was really fortunate. I think. If I, in fact, I know if I tried to start the same thing 10 years later, I would have failed.
Kevin King:
So that was back when you said Reno won. So that was like their very first FBA warehouse. So you must have been like right on the early beginning of when they opened up the marketplace to third party sellers before it was super popular, made popular by an amazing selling machine in 2011 or something like that. Everybody’s in this now pretty much because of them. It’s kind of set off this trend, so you were one of the early guys.
Bernie:
Yeah, and I wasn’t going to shows or really networking in those early days. There was one conference that I went to. It was called SCOE, s-c-o-e, and it was actually there where I sat down for a few hours and talked to this Google engineer who his wife was running an Amazon business and he was thinking about quitting and going at it big time. His name was Stephen Yang, the founder of Anchor. That went public for 10 billion US just a few years ago. So yeah, so it was a funny time where-
Kevin King:
You could have hired Stephen Anchor, Stephen Yang, I mean.
Bernie:
Well, no, he wouldn’t have been hirable. He definitely had bigger ambitions than me. He definitely had bigger ambitions than me, but we were there at the same time. I was actually a little ahead of where he was at that time. And then Anchor is an amazing story, a real flagship for Chinese brands, and has just done amazing.
Kevin King:
So your background, though, is so before doing these electronics, you come from the IT software engineering background right, IBM, Microsoft. You ran a couple companies yourself before getting into this e-commerce game.
Bernie:
Yeah, no, I mean a serious software engineer. That was my degree. I went out of college, worked at IBM on the OS2 operating system. Actually, the first thing I did was as an intern. You had all these graphic standards back then. You had EGA and VGA and Super VGA and I took OS2’s VGA driver and produced a Super VGA version that would work at believe it or not 800 by 600 resolution, and my management was really excited about an intern pulling this off with no support. And then I went to work there full time afterward and then worked at Microsoft. I ended up managing the USB team, yeah, and through all that stuff we would try to do our best to produce a great product. That would be a great experience for people who are connecting devices, you know, on Windows and whatnot. But there was always stuff that the, you know you really needed the device maker to do right. So, the good thing was, I started this business that became kind of an Amazon business in some ways. Not as an Amazon business at all. I was trying to build a better device company. I was trying to solve, you know, kind of some technical customer support and industry issues and do something in a better way. And then because of the timing and Amazon, you know that ended up becoming a big part of the story of what happened in the end.
Kevin King:
So when you went out on your own to do this, to fill this little gap where you saw was it chips or circuit boards, or was it cables, or what did you start off with under the Plugable brand?
Bernie:
Yeah, it’s actually interesting because the first thing I did failed completely. I had been an executive at a company called DisplayLink, which is a USB graphics technology, and I had actually developed their Linux, kind of as a side project, because I was technically a manager or whatever, but as a side project I had developed a Linux driver for that. And then, in trying to put that to use, I developed this terminal system where you could take these USB docking stations. Take a Linux PC, just plug one in and up pops a terminal. Plug another one in, up pops a second terminal off the same machine, and so on and so on, and so on, up to you know, eight, ten, twelve terminals off a single pc. And uh, so I thought, well, as long as display links, okay, with this, I’m going to quit and build a business around this USB thin client, you know, using their, their chips, their technology underneath. And so I did that and I spoke at a Linux kernel conference that fall of 2009. There’s a video up on YouTube somewhere with me I met I had met Linus Tervalds, the founder of Linux, a bunch of times before because we had both been in that space got to see him again there at that conference.
Bernie:
But then I brought that product to market on Amazon and it failed entirely. There was crickets on sales. It’s one of those classic dilemmas and actually we’re dealing with this dilemma very much right now too. Whereas if you go and innovate on something, if you do something that’s never been done before, it’s up to you to educate the market and create awareness and create interest and create demand. And you know, and I’m really the worst at marketing, Kevin.
And it was really showing at that point, I actually had something that was kind of interesting, but I couldn’t get it to sell. So, I sat down with a buddy of mine from Microsoft, who’s a good friend, and I said well, you know, this is really not going so well. I’m six months in. What do you think I should do? And you know, my friend said well, you know, you’re already multitasking like crazy. It’s a one person company. You better, you know, kind of focus and stick with this and try to make this thing work. And I looked at the situation with what was happening with Amazon and some of the timing and ended up making the opposite decision. I ended up saying okay, what I’m going to do is I’m going to actually broaden way out. Just get kind of off the shelf stuff and bring it in under the pluggable brand and then maybe I’ll get back to that thin client at some point. And I never got back to the thin client, everything else took off.
Kevin King:
And so fast forward to today that brand is still Pluggable. You haven’t changed the name. 16 years later, it’s doing a healthy well, it’s doing eight-figures. Um, and I know there’s been some uh, because in that now a lot of people when they say you know, they’re advising people to sell on Amazon, they’re saying stay the hell away from electronics. That’s a complicated, very cutthroat, very race to the bottom category with a lot of regulations on some things and no regulations in the Wild West on others. How have you found that to be? I mean, in the beginning was it like, oh, this is pretty easy, there’s not too much stuff. And then over time, more and more sellers from outside the United States coming in and not playing by the rules and cutting corners and not getting certifications and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Can you walk me through how this has evolved from when you first started? And things were probably pretty easy compared to now?
Bernie:
Yeah, yeah, the first few years were Goldilocks because Amazon was in hyper growth mode and they just they weren’t, you know, overstuffed with partners yet and it was interesting. You know, actually, you know, around the time we first met Kevin I, you know again I forget where that was 2016, 2017. You know, we had already kind of gotten into trouble at that point where the competition was intense in electronics, like generally, everything that’s happened competitively has tended to happen a few years earlier in electronics. Why is that? It’s a pretty big category, there’s a lot at stake and it’s a real focal area for China, I mean, you have incentives at every level of government within China, um, in terms of, you know, financing, in terms of tax, in terms of kind of outright support and certainly trade focus and so by that time, really 2015, you had a large number of very strong and very aggressive Chinese brands in the electronics category. So, you know, fast forward to today, in 2025, there’s not a lot of Western brands left. I mean, we’re one of the few and almost I think we’re perhaps really, I mean, I don’t, I can’t even identify another Western brand that started late. That’s still around, like nobody is entering this fresh right now. So, again, I was lucky with my timing in 2009.
Bernie:
And the tariffs actually have not made that better. You’d think they might have, but what ends up happening is the tariffs have an outsized effect in electronics because the margins are relatively low because of the competition. It’s not uncommon for us to be sourcing something at 50 bucks and selling it at 100. And that’s how brutal the category is. And it’s not because we want to, it’s because that’s the way it goes in electronics. And then, when you add in tariffs on that, tariffs are a huge part of the equation. And then tariff avoidance if you have competition that’s able to avoid tariffs and you’re not able to, it really picks market winners and losers. And that was actually already beginning to happen with the first round of tariffs back in 2018. Even though the amounts were uneven and not as high as they were today, you basically had between 7.5 and 25% since 2018. And that has actually given a lot of brands willing to do tariff avoidance a pretty substantial advantage in the market and that’s much easier for, or much more, it’s ill-advised for, a US citizen and an American company to do that the kind of aggressive tariff avoidance, you will eventually get yourself in trouble, whereas if you’ve got a company that’s overseas, that you can, you know, shut down, you might lose a shipment and then come back in a new form. You know it’s very attractive to avoid those tariffs, and so I think it’s also it’s been a contributor to why the electronics category has this reputation of being just a very difficult category to build a brand in.
Kevin King:
So what are some of these tariff avoidance things they’re doing? Is it shipping it to other countries? Is it under declaring the value? Is it sending them in unit by unit by unit, using e-packet, so the US Post Office pays half the price to send it in? Or what are they doing? What have you been seeing and how has that changed over time, or has it?
Bernie:
Right, yeah, it actually hadn’t changed much until the spring, but obviously some things are changing. And one good thing is you know the elimination, or largely eliminating, the de minimis exemption. So you know shipments under $800 in declared value. You know that people have been able to get stuff into the US no hassle. So then you know that becomes a foundation for you know like in electronics you have a relatively high value to weight ratio. So if you can misdeclare the HS code, the categorization of the product, you know it doesn’t look like a lot of stuff and so declared with one HS code, it might be a 25% rate and then declared with actually not all that different of an HS code, it might be 7.5 or even zero and the volume’s not that huge. So that’s not going to attract attention. So HS code gamesmanship has definitely been part of the game. The other thing the $800 de minimis gave as an option was importing in bulk into Canada or Mexico and then just trickling into the US in under $800 shipments. And again, if you could fit more into that 800 than somebody legally would, it makes that even more easy to do. That, I think the type of products that our average selling price is up over $100. And so what’s happened to us? And that’s partially because that’s a good area to be in, but it’s also because we got pushed out of a lot of the 10, 20, 30, $50 products, and I think part of the reason that happened is because some of these tariff avoidance strategies and things around de minimis were especially determinative. If you’re the seller of like a $20 product in electronics, where you don’t have a high margin but you do, you know you can basically ship a lot. Something small like a cable, you know you can ship a lot in potentially under the 800.
Bernie:
But there’s a lot of other strategies. I mean simply under declaring the value of goods and, by the way, that doesn’t have to be something that they’re breaking the rules on. So when you’re a factory, a factory brand in China and you’re declaring your commercial invoice value on the goods, you don’t need to include your profit. You can profit, shift that to the US in theory and you might not even have a US taxable entity and keep that off of your declared value of goods and that is perfectly legal and so kind of as a starting point. In Amazon in 2025, you’re mostly competing against factory brands in China, or at least the big ones are, and they are legally paying less in tariffs than you on the same good sourced from that same factory. And then there’s all the illegal things just simply declaring a value that’s fictitious, not including, you know, things that you should, that are really kind of inputs into the cost of production, like labor. Very easy for them to get away with under declaring the value of goods in terms of labor and other inputs like that. You know what’s the US government going to do. They get a shipment. They think that that value looks too low. They ask for a bunch of paperwork justifying that declared value. I mean this another kind of challenge for everybody competing these Chinese companies. You know they are really good in paperwork.
Bernie:
The commerce kind of flows like water to wherever the business is and things like paperwork are. You know, really just, you know little hurdles to jump over and they’re very good at jumping over them. It’s been an interesting environment where especially right now here in 2025, you’ve got this whole gigantic set of disruption around tariffs which kind of the reason for doing that makes sense but then the different ways of doing it have totally different outcomes depending on whether you really know what’s happening and you’re really realistic about how to get this done in a way benefits US businesses rather than hurting them.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I think I. Just on last week’s episode I had Chris Keefe on and he was talking. One of their things is protecting against IP right now, AMZ Watchdog is the name of the company and helping people protect against IP violations and he gave an example of a client that’s selling flashlights. I mean, he’s like these factories are now more and more of them are going direct. There’s a term for it, not DTC, but like DCD or something. I forget the exact name, but you know, like FBA or whatever. It’s like factory direct. Uh, now maybe it’s FD, FDD or whatever, but there are a lot of are going direct. And he said but they can make all kinds of claims that are totally wrong. So they, this guy. He’s got a flashlight company that was selling like $10 million worth of flashlights or something through their Shopify site and they go on Amazon and they can barely sell anything and they’re, and it’s just they’re trying to help them. He’s like a flashlight I forget the exact terminology, so forget. This is not exact, but he’s like a flashlight can’t go over I don’t know 10,000 lumens, which is a measure of light, but they’ll come on there and they’ll say there are a million lumens and he’s like it’s totally wrong, there is no such thing, they’ll just lie. Or if they need a certification, like I know, like you know Apple, to have some of the Apple cables you have to actually have a license from Apple for was it US for lightning or something like that, and that that takes a 20 cent cable to $4 or whatever. It is because Apple wants to have a very hefty license fee. So these guys just don’t do it. But they say it’s an Apple certified cable and you buy it and it works for two days and then quits or whatever, and they have all these problems.
Kevin King:
So he’s like the number one thing is Washington and all the people doing this terrorist. They have no clue what’s going on and the people advising them have no clue what’s going on down in the trenches. He’s like every single person. It should be just like TikTok. To sell on TikTok shop in the US you have to have a US entity, US driver’s license, all that kind of stuff, so that there’s a responsible party. Japan has you know, you gotta have you have this thing in Japan where it’s responsible party in other places. You don’t have that in the US and he’s like everybody selling on Amazon in the US should have to have a US entity, US base, so we can sue them, so we can actually go after them. Because they have this. Not only are they not playing by the rules, but they have this, this immunity shield that makes it next to impossible to enforce and it’s a problem. It’s a. It’s a major, major problem, way beyond this trade imbalance and stuff that and Amazon is doubling and tripling down on this. Amazon is like aggressively going after factories and like come on, get to get, let’s get our customer a better price, we don’t care if the stuff’s certified or not, we’ll tell, tell you, just tell us it is okay, we’ll believe you. Uh, and they’re doubling down on. Nobody’s really showing this side of things and how bad that actually is. Uh, and that’s where the fundamental problems and de minimis, like you said, helps. You know, back in May, Trump dialed that back a little bit, you know, and then he put the 90 day, changed it back to 30% for 90 days. So we’ll see what happens here come, come August. Who knows where this is going to go, but there there’s problems way beyond on that.
Kevin King:
How do we? How, as Western sellers and, like yourself, you know, based here in the West how do we deal with that? Or can we even? I mean it’s not like it’s not. I mean Shenzhen’s the capital of electronics in the world. It used to be Taiwan, you know, I mean, when I was a kid, everything said, all my little race cars said made in Taiwan on the bottom. But now everything is made in China, and primarily electronics, is Shenzhen’s the capital of that, to my understanding. And you can’t just pick that up and move that to the United States or pick that up and move it to Vietnam. There’s just so many things from engineering talent to systems, to operations and the Chinese are really really good at second level innovation. They might not be the one who have come up with the original idea but very good at taking whatever you develop and then innovating on it and getting it cheaper and cutting corners and doing whatever to make that make it even better. That’s decades to catch up to that. So it’s, what is the? What do we do? How do we? How do we deal with this? What are your thoughts on that?
Bernie:
Well, you know so and I think that’s why you know. Interestingly, the problems that are that these tariffs are trying to solve are real problems. It’s all in kind of the way. And I would say that the characterization. So Chinese companies are, like you say, great at second level innovation, you know, taking something that exists already, copying it, making it better. But I would say we’re long past that thing on like kind of that first innovation. They are the best at that also. I mean, they’re getting there-
Kevin King:
You look at deep seek and some of the AI stuff and when you said that statement earlier about how the government was supporting, uh, the electronics industry there, because they knew that they’re behind in the brain hunt and the technology side and they knew that’s going to be the weapon of the 21st century is technology, and so that’s probably one of the reasons they’re helping anchors and those guys grow along, because they need to cultivate that.
Bernie:
Absolutely.
Kevin King:
But I agree, yeah, I mean you look at, I think I saw some study that it used to be the smartest Chinese would come to the West, whether that’s the US or Canada or Europe, and go to school. A lot of them would end up staying here and working for Microsoft or IBM or whatever. But now a lot of them are going back and then a lot of them are not even coming here anymore. They’re just staying there and going to school and the pool is so high and you have, you know, I remember a story. Somebody was trying to open a chip plant I think it was in Wisconsin or Indiana or somewhere and they got all these subsidies from the US government and they started to do the planning like we can’t open it here, we don’t have, there’s nobody that can work this plant and we can bring some Chinese people over and you know, give them some uh work visas, but they’re going to. They don’t want to. A lot of them don’t want to be here, they want to go back. And you look at you and I go to China quite a bit. China’s main cities are far more advanced than any city, any city in the United States, from every level technology to transportation, to infrastructure, to you name it they’re way ahead. And what do we do?
Bernie:
Yeah Well, I mean, I don’t know how political to get here on the show, Kevin, but I think the first thing is to stop lying to ourselves and look at this reality, because then after-.
Kevin King:
Is it a lying, or is it a lack of knowledge?
Bernie:
Well, both.
Kevin King:
Is it a naivety or a cumbrous? What do they call it, cumbrous or whatever? A pride of America, Cumbrous, Pride of America. Or is it lying?
Bernie:
Yeah, I think it starts with ignorance and then quickly becomes a lie as people try to get more ramped up about this or that right. But the reason why we have to see the reality is because we’ve got to claw our way back intelligently. It’s not because we’re not in the situation we are with certain technologies, certain types of businesses, physical goods generally. We’re not in that situation because necessarily, like somebody’s been ripping us off, let’s say, or, you know, use that kind of terminology. It’s more that we’ve gotten systematically beat. Some of that has to do with unfair practices that we’ve got to look out for ourselves and make those unfair practices not function or be policed, but a lot of it is. We got to pump out more engineering grads and we got to continue to attract the best and the brightest from around the world to American universities, because we desperately need those people to compete with China, who’s pumping out 10 times as many engineers as we are annually. And of course, some things are changing. I mean it’s unclear exactly how many engineers you’re going to need to turn the manufacturing light bulb in an era of AI. I mean, maybe people aren’t going to be the problem, I’m not sure, but we do need to be, you know, kind of cool headed and really you know, like some of these details, that we’re just, you know, touching the edges of. You know you got to go deep on those and pick the right policy changes that are really going to make a difference.
Bernie:
You know, like the one you were highlighting there, Kevin of you know, to engage in commerce in the United States, you’ve got to be legally reachable in the United States. I think it’s a great principle and actually, by the way, if I were to try to import something into China, that’s exactly what China would require of me. I’ve got to, you know, in order to hold goods in China, I’ve got to have a Chinese company. So, you know, we’re under-focusing on some of those super critical details because they’re complicated and there’s a lot of them, and yet that is the foundation by which we can actually, you know, get more competitive and, in some industries, claw our way back. I mean, there’s still industries where we’re ahead, but it’s less and less each year. And so you know, I mean I’m I’m definitely an advocate of we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing, you know, the last three, three or four decades. You know, and the world can’t either. I mean actually the, the, the US again, this is super political, but, you know, the US had an opportunity to help the rest of the world see that, hey, this is a problem, all of us being dependent on all of our physical goods to come from one country and then work together on a, a very methodical strategy to work against that, and what happened instead was just a lot of disruption, including disrupting relationships with our allies, and that’s made us weaker and less able, you know, to build that kind of, you know, joint action to make some things happen that, I think, is in kind of everybody’s interest, but it’s not too late.
Bernie:
I, we can, you know, and I’m, and I’d love to talk about the kind of company level. What can each of us do, as you know, as companies and brands, and you know tech manufacturers, you know, basically, we uh, you know we got to figure out a systemic way rather than, you know, looking for some sort of um, you know magic wand that we can wave.
Kevin King:
You would have thought we would have learned some lessons during COVID when it highlighted some of the you know the PPE all coming out, but it seems like not a whole lot has changed. You know there’s a lot of rhetoric and a lot of talk and a lot of drum beating but nothing has really changed. And you know a lot of talk in our space in the Amazon world is oh, just go source. We were just at recently two or three people like oh, just go to Vietnam. Oh, just switch your manufacturing to Mexico or Indonesia, let’s bring it back on short in the US. You could do some of that in some categories and some products, but the vast majority you can’t. So what do we do as individual sellers while we’re waiting for government to sort this out? How do we play? What do we do? Do we shut up and go become an influencer? And do another hot thing right now instead of doing this? Or what do we do?
Bernie:
Yeah, yeah, and I think what we do is very dependent obviously on our category and everything like that. I mean I can talk a little bit about what we’re doing and you know it’s really I mean I’d say I mean just to kind of say the hard and honest part about it. To start with, we’re getting out of the way of the Chinese brands. You know, if I’m going to go head to head with a Chinese brand on a pro, on basically the same kind of product, I’m not going to win that battle not on Amazon anyway. And so you know what we’re doing is trying to get out of that. And so you know it just. You know, just this spring we’ve launched two major technologies that are patented, trademarked, involve a combination of hardware and software and actually, partially because of AI, we’re actually able to do more software development than we have in the past with a smaller investment. That’s kind of more we’re able to afford. And so one is we came out with a software-defined charger. We have a 10-port model and a 6-port model. You plug in the USB-C charger you already have plug in 10 devices and by morning they’re all charged. Nothing like this has ever existed before. It’s patented and there’s a lot of software involved, and so we’re kind of getting out of the way of the Chinese by doing it that way.
Kevin King:
But are you? They’ll just knock you off. I mean, the patents don’t matter to them, the IP doesn’t matter. Last week we had someone doing something called an easy charger. On the podcast last week, he was talking about this client that has an easy charger and it’s something that I don’t understand exactly how it works. But you plug it in and it gives you an extra six inches from the wall when you can’t fit everything in. But she patented this whole thing. She went through it. He’s like it’s a brilliant product, so evidently it’s different than what we may have in our mind. And he says she put it up on Amazon and within two a month, 153 counterfeits. I’m making all kinds of claims. Within two months she was shut down for IP violation uh, her own product on her own product. So how that? That all sounds good like what you’re saying here, but they don’t. They don’t, they don’t play by the same rules and they don’t care. So how do you, how do you actually? Maybe the software component to yours is the answer that that’s a harder thing, but to sort of duplicate, you know.
Kevin King:
But how do you? Those are good steps, don’t get me wrong. That’s, that’s great steps and, I think, in the right, in the right direction. But it’s still if you, if you do this and you prove that there’s, there’s money here, just like the trash business in New Jersey, they’re going to go there, you know, and start taking over the trash business. So they’re going to follow if you’re successful. So do you try to deliberately not be and stay under that radar, like I don’t want to be a bestseller, I want to be like down here in this niche where they don’t really play and just have a lot of products you know, 50 products instead of four that are doing the same volume, or how do you approach that?
Bernie:
Yeah, I mean. Unfortunately, that particular strategy of staying under the radar doesn’t work in electronics, because electronics you generally have a very high what’s you know called an NRE non-recurring engineering investment, you know, in the product so you know, you’re kind of forced to actually be to go for high volume and if you haven’t hit the high volume you probably haven’t paid off. You know what you invested into the product, which is another thing that makes electronics a hard category. Yeah, I think all the details and such matter, I mean that’s a horrible story what you talked about there with that other person. Now the first thing I’m thinking is well, was that a design patent or a utility patent that she had? Because design patents are relatively easy to get. You know, they’re on the look of the product and the kind of mechanical configuration of the product and they might cost a few thousand dollars to get, so a lot of people are drawn to them. They’re a little quicker, you know utility patent is on how the product functions and that’s quite a bit of a stronger type of patent to get. Uh, and so when I’m talking about patents, I’m mostly talking about getting utility patents, but you still have enforceability as an issue and, uh, you know Amazon’s current process and you know, correct me if you know any anything different, Kevin, is you know this, this patent neutral evaluation process where if somebody makes a patent accusation against another ASIN or another seller, they have to plunk down. I think it’s $3,000 currently.
Bernie:
If the other seller wants to contest, they have to plunk down the same amount of money and then it goes to a neutral arbiter to decide whether or not there is patent infringement and then whoever wins gets to keep their money. Whoever loses loses the money. And of course, if you you know, if you’re accused of patent infringement and you lose, you know that ASIN at least will be taken down. Now, how well that’s really working in practice, we haven’t tested it. So we haven’t actually taken down anybody else’s ASINs through that particular process yet. We were involved with several patent suits from years prior, prior to the way the current system works and all of those ones worked out in our favor. But we’re always thinking about intellectual property, both kind of avoiding trouble and also protecting ourselves. So, anyways, that’s a bad story with that other person, and the speed at which she was copied kind of lends me to think that either that was a solution that was out there already or, um, that the copies were really coming from her own factory. And that issue is leads to another thing to do, which is don’t source from China. You know, and, uh, you know there’s a. Obviously the tariffs give you a reason not to source from China because generally although on April 2nd it looked like, you know, tariffs might be more equal around the world, and that was a terrible world for, for you know, a US brand. But at this point where we’re sitting, tariff rates generally are higher against imports from China, generally lower for other countries. So, you know, we actually were very aggressive about moving out of China, starting even before the Trump tariffs, I mean starting back in I don’t know 2015, 2016.
Bernie:
We had begun asking our supply chain hey, you know, do you have any options to move this? And actually the driving force behind that was this sort of situation that the person you’re talking about hit, where you know you’re sourcing from a factory in China and then you don’t realize that that factory or that factory owner’s brother or something they have a brand too. And so as soon as you bring something to that factory or as soon as you have some success with something they’ve developed. Suddenly you know that same product pops up at it at pricing that you just can’t compete with because they’re connected, you know, directly with the uh, with the factory, and have the other tax and tariff advantages and everything. So, yeah, so so I think it’s hazardous right now, not just because of tariffs, to do sourcing from China, and I know that’s a I mean, that’s not a mainstream position, I think even today because of how hard it is to source outside of China. I mean basically your options go way down when you’re sourcing outside of China.
Kevin King:
How much have you been able to move outside of China? Has it moved to Vietnam or has it moved to Cambodia? Hard drives are big in Cambodia. Some electronic stuff I know is done in Mexico, but that’s more final assembly stuff and not the actual raw materials are still coming out of China. But even moving it out, a lot of the raw materials for your goods still happen to come from China or some of the parts.
Bernie:
Yeah so, absolutely yeah. So it took us eight years, uh, but we got 90 of our production by revenue out of China last year and it’s going to go down to single digits this year. Now that’s revenue SKUs are a little bit more mixed because we have a lot of kind of uh, low revenue SKUs that are and they’re low revenue actually because they’re kind of commodity products and so those ones, as you know, the tariffs increase this year. We’re making a lot of EOL decisions. We’re just discontinuing a bunch of those SKUs and just not fighting that battle. Yeah, and you know. So our, you know our strategy was really to focus on Taiwan and Taiwanese companies as this kind of manufacturer for the world. So you know what happened 30 years ago in China? Well, Deng Xiaoping and others opened up the country to commerce in one way or another. You know, said within the communist system, hey, it’s glorious to get rich. And then really it was Taiwanese companies who came into China and taught them how to manufacture. You know, as you were pointing that out earlier. So you know, Foxconn is the poster child for that, the gigantic manufacturer for Apple that has at least a million employees in China and has been making all our iPhones for the last 15, 20 years. That’s a Taiwanese company.
Bernie:
So you know, there’s this supply chain of really knowledgeable people and companies in Taiwan and they have been seeing the same pressures. Basically, they’re getting replaced by Chinese manufacturers. They’re kind of on the high end and that’s led them to look outside of China. The tariffs have pushed that further and so you know, for us it’s a mix of Vietnam, Thailand, actually Taiwan itself. Even though it’s a small place, they do still some manufacturing there, and those are kind of the main places that we’ve moved to. But in most cases it’s these companies from Taiwan who have that know-how to be able to move production.
Kevin King:
Yeah, that’s the world’s chip. I mean chips advanced chips, it’s Taiwan, that’s the leader.
Bernie:
TSMC, you know.
Kevin King:
And all that. Yeah, it’s all Taiwan. But even with Taiwan, you got the geopolitical issue there. You know China still says that’s ours, give me, we’re taking this back. So you still even going to Taiwan, you have the risk of who knows what’s going to happen three, four, five, 10 years from now.
Bernie:
Absolutely.
Kevin King:
And that may be part of China again, we don’t know. Or it’s going to start World War three, whatever, whatever it is. So it’s tough. Why can we not, why can you not just bring it to the United States, right? Why can we not do? What’s the problem? Is it raw materials? Is it talent? Is it nobody’s willing to work for $6 an hour to put this stuff together? Because you go to Taiwan. I was just in Taipei last year and it’s a very modern place. There’s a lot of money there, there’s a lot of very successful people there. It’s not like at least Taipei I mean, maybe out in the countryside is different. I didn’t go on the deep countryside but it’s a very. You know, it’s not as modern as China because the cities aren’t, you know, five, five years old, um, but it’s a, it’s a very. I think. As someone told me, the average income there’s one of the highest in the world, uh, average, you know, employee, uh, worker I forget what the number was, but it’s up there, very close to, if not surpassing, the United States as far as average household income.
Bernie:
Yeah, Taiwan does really well economically. Their income is the typical salary in Taiwan is quite a bit lower than and actually at times it’s been a real rub for engineers in Taiwan that sometimes the salaries in mainland China are actually higher for them, and that’s partially because they’re trying to do knowledge transfer through hiring the right people. But yeah, in terms of-
Kevin King:
When I said the wages, I think I meant across the board, on all industries as a standard of living, versus I think you’re right. Certain industries it’s definitely lower than what you could get somewhere else. Yeah, I agree.
Bernie:
Yeah, Taiwan’s great. I mean I would yeah, Taiwan’s great I mean I would love to live in Taiwan. I mean, what a wonderful place. Taipei is an amazing city, you know, very modern, yeah, and so you know why can they do some manufacturing there where we struggle, you know, with that same kind of manufacturing in the US. So I think it’s complicated, but it’s a bunch of different factors. I mean number one has to be you just don’t have the support from the supply chain here in the US that you have there. So if I’m in Shenzhen, for sure I mean I can walk a little square kilometer or square mile and I will probably hit like 10 injection molders and you know four or five contract pick and place, pick and paste places. Yeah, you know the amount of companies that do all the components of manufacturing stuff, with all the different materials and all the different processes. They’re just everywhere.
Kevin King:
What’s that? What’s that one market there. It’s like I mean, they have them for different industries, but I know there’s one in electronics. Like you go into it, and it’s like all these stalls are like 10 by 10 stalls and each one of them has specializes in one thing. Like this guy’s got the screws. You need a screw of any size, of any head, of any length, of any, whatever. It’s 10,000 different types of screws, you know. And then the next guy’s got you know something for nails. And the next guy’s got something for the little piece that you need to put on a semiconductor to hold it down or whatever. It’s insane.
Bernie:
Yeah, and we don’t have it here.
Kevin King:
Right there, you get it immediately. You don’t need to special order it or wait.
Bernie:
Yeah, I remember so many times early on where you know, because I wasn’t ordering huge quantities of stuff where I was talking with my supplier and said, you know, hey, can we get 500 more? You know, we really need them. Amazon’s growing fast, we’re doing the sales. He’s like, okay, I’ll get one of my guys to go over to that market and get the parts that they needed to assemble that extra 500. Normally they would have gone straight to the supplier. But because it was a rush, you know, they could kind of walk out their door and walk down the street and find the parts. You know to do that and I was like, wow, so that’s a big part of it is, you know, just that, supply chain infrastructure. So then the, you know, another big part is labor and it’s both just kind of general availability of labor and then the skills of the labor and the uh desire, or I hate to use work ethic, but it’s just a different kind of work ethic. I mean they are strong, I mean the and this is not knocking anybody in the US with the work ethic, but people in China work their asses off. You know you got the–
Kevin King:
966. There used to be the 999 or 996. Nine hours, no 966.
Bernie:
Nine hours, six days a week or something.
Kevin King:
Whatever yeah, six days a week. Yeah, nine hours a day. Six days a week, six to six. Ah yeah, whatever it was, but yeah, it’s crazy.
Bernie:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
Nobody’s going to do that here, except some of the illegal people that are here to try to make a better life.
Bernie:
And that’s the high paid, you know, college educated, information workers for the factory workers, which are often, you know, historically, we’re often a lot of women, often from the countryside. I mean lots of men too. For them, it was more that you know they would live in a dorm right on the Foxconn campus or right at the factory. And you know, suddenly Apple gets a flood of orders, you know, because the iPhone 4 is more popular than you know, than they expected. Well, they are literally waking people up in the dorms in China, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people up and saying make more you know and yeah-
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Bernie:
There’s just no equivalent in the United States. Now I will say one thing about all this, which is that the other thing that’s happening in China, which is so amazing to watch, is they actually have more robots per capita than we do in the US. So here in the US we have this huge problem with a lack of labor, a lack of labor pool, lack of skills. So our only solution, really the only hope for the long term, is automation, I agree, and in China they’re out automating us right now. If you go into a factory in China today, versus 10 years ago, at least in my space of electronics you’re going to find robots all over the factory and automation all over that factory. You go to a contract assembler down in California or somewhere here in the US. Yeah, there’s pick and place machines for the actual PCBs, but pretty much everything after that is just handwork. We are doing it less efficiently than they’re doing it in China, and I was actually kind of surprised about this because I kind of thought the Chinese government, because they do kind of have like, right now, the youth unemployment rate in China is not nothing, it’s actually kind of high.
Kevin King:
There’s a term for it. They don’t want to work. What’s that term? Yeah, the lay flat, the lay flat, yeah, yeah.
Bernie:
And I don’t know how much is choice or not, but you know so, despite what could be a situation where you might expect a government like China’s to say, hey, you know, put these people to work actually China’s really focused on kind of winning for the long term. And that includes in, you know, really strong financial encouragement of robotics and automation, both because they can develop their own robotics industry that way that’s definitely a part of it but also because you know they really want to kind of win the long game, not win the short game. To win the short game, you’d put the people to work, but to win the long game, you invest in robotics and automation, and they’re doing that in China.
Kevin King:
Can’t we compete, though, on that level in the United States? I mean, you have Musk saying that there’s going to be a robot in everybody’s house in five or 10 years, and I mean, what is it? Is it cost structure here? Is it lack of government support and incentives? Is it what I mean? Cause that could solve the problem? I mean, I mean robot, the small handwork, like you said, robots. That’s going to be more difficult. You know you’re painting a little figurine. You know a little small little figurine of a toy soldier or something you probably. You know that’s going to be difficult for robots, at least today. I mean down the road, probably. But the bigger, bigger tasks, um, should be a hundred percent fully automatable. Is it just a money thing? Is it a money and lack of support thing?
Bernie:
Yeah, I think, I think it is in some ways. I mean so. So the foundation is stability. In order to invest in robotics in a factory environment, you know you need a, you need a stable, multi-year timeframe to make those kind of investments. You mentioned earlier the pandemic and PPE. You know, in the pandemic, you know people were really rightfully upset. You know that we couldn’t make any of our own masks or PPE here in the US, and so I don’t know if you remember, but at that time that was all over the news and there was a couple kind of courageous business owners who ramped up either production at a factory that already existed or opened up some new capacity producing PPE in the US. Well, within 12 months, those companies were wiped out as the situation normalized and supply flooded in from outside the US.
Bernie:
So, you know, and tariffs alone doesn’t solve that, actually partially because of the, you know, the policing and enforcement, partially because it’s really just kind of one tool that you need to use among many, and so yeah, so I think it’s more of this. You know we need an industrial policy in the US that has some sticks, like tariffs, that punish people who manufacture outside the US, and some carrots, like you know, support, you know having a highly educated, trained workforce. You know we don’t want illegal immigrants in the United States, but you know what America was built on immigrants. We should have a really strong legal immigration process to get the best and the brightest here and also have the kind of people who can do the factory work that maybe people generally don’t want to do.
Kevin King:
I read something too about the back on the support thing real quick. I read something there’s a factory in China and they were making something for a guy and he’s like, yeah, I think we’re going to probably need to double our sales if things keep going on this trajectory. So, the factory just went out, they got funding from the Chinese government and they started building a whole new factory down the road, without a commitment, without anything, just going. Okay, we’re going to get ahead of this, we’re going to go put this factory up and we got 200 guys. We can have this up in three weeks. Remember the pandemic? They were building these freaking crazy things and working 24-7. That mentality doesn’t exist here and that’s part of our problem is I think it’s a mental shift and it’s a cultural shift that I don’t know that we can do without something another 9-11 type of catastrophe happening that unites us.
Bernie:
Yeah, no, I think you know. I hope we actually treat the current situation as you know, rather than, you know, like a trade war or something. We need to treat it more like a sputnik moment, you know, like a wake-up call, that it’s not that we need to, you know, like punish somebody else, it’s that we need to wake up actually, uh, and do some things different.
Kevin King:
So what’s going to happen? Is political, political going to be around in five, ten years or are you going to be onto the next thing? Because
Bernie:
I have no idea. It’s a hard business. You know we were. We were solidly profitable for, you know, our first 13 years of existence and then we’ve had a rough two years. This year we’re profitable again, after two negative years.
Kevin King:
Did you have to cut volume in sales to hit that I mean stop the growth to actually hit the profitability? Or are you still seeing some growth and you’re actually able to return the profitability by shifting some of what you talked about earlier?
Bernie:
Yeah, so no, I think it’s just a combination of things. Yeah, we did cut back on growth and focused on where we, you know some of that focusing I was talking about, you know, focus, focus away from direct competition with China, which is basically on commodity products, on Amazon, and focus everywhere else, which is off Amazon sales and non-commodity products. So, yeah, and I think that is, you know, limits our growth, because those years where we could just do commodity products really was an unlock for fast growth, because now you don’t need to invest as much, you know, and so, but those years aren’t coming back. You know that 2009 to whatever it was 2018 period where growth was easy. So, yeah, so it’s more of an uphill battle, but we’re fighting it and we’re launching new products pretty much every month and we’re actually investing more in each one because we have to and we don’t know when we launch them whether that’s smart or dumb. We won’t know really, because of you know the ramp time for maybe a year, you know whether we’re going to get that investment back.
Kevin King:
How’s AI affecting what you’re doing? I mean, I had a guy on the other podcast to do marketing misfits who’s doing custom shoes right now AI shoes, so you can actually go on. You take, you take pictures with your phone of your feet and you send it to them and they can actually customize. They’re doing slip-ons and tennis shoes right now not pure athletic, not to go play basketball. It’s going to get to there and they actually create a custom shoe for you so influencers can actually have their own custom shoe. And he says it cuts the shoe time down from 18 months and all these costs for molds and something called locks and all this different stuff that you need to make a shoe to under three months. So it’s all AI and it’s just on the cutting edge and they’re going to expand this to a lot of other things as soon as they dial it in. And he’s got the founder of Reebok backing him and on his board it’s a young, 25-year-old kid doing this. This really sharp guy. You’re pretty on top of this and you have the scientific background there and the programming background. Where do you see this going?
Bernie:
Yeah, everything we talked about actually so far here is actually kind of the view from this point in time, but AI kind of changes everything. I mean actually the real path forward as you start looking out three, five, seven years is going to be defined by AI and some of the things we talked about where we feel trapped, you know, as company owners or as a whole country, AI is going to totally shift the playing field and some of the things we feel trapped about we’re not going to be trapped on anymore and I think the AI companies talk about this year being the year of agents, like you said. But really I think what this year is even if the agentic stuff goes into next year, the year where kind of everybody realizes software development’s never going to be the same. So the products that we’re launching at Plugable this spring, including some that we launched late last fall, would not have been possible without AI help. I mean we would have been slower, we would have had to invest more, and that slowness and that greater investment would have meant we wouldn’t have done the products in some cases. So it’s already affecting our velocity of product development and we’re combining software with hardware more.
Bernie:
And then the other thing, I mean being a software engineer, and actually this is true. We talked earlier about Stephen Yang of Anchor. Both Stephen and I were software engineers, like two of the. You know, he’s got the biggest electronics company in the world at this point in terms of the peripheral space and we’re not nearly that large we’re like a hundredth anchor size but we’re, you know, we’ve been successful for a long time. Both of us did the same thing back in 2009, 2010, 2011. We were writing software against what was at that time called the MWS API. We were pulling the reports, we were digging through the data, we were building just-in-time inventory management systems to do purchase orders at the right time based on the sales velocity. Monitoring our listings, you know, looking for, you know, competitors, you know, or Amazon processes going awry, sticking our products in wrong categories and things like that. So I’ve been doing that for 15 years with software that I handcrafted, initially, you know, kind of back in 2011, 2012. And then in later years I was less involved but I had expensive people who had to maintain and move that software forward.
Bernie:
Well, come around to 2025, that software is so much easier to make now. You know we you know we had to recreate a piece of functionality around day parting, the overall system. We had a system to do that and that overall system took several years to create before, basically, in about a month, I recreated the day parting tool and I did it totally AI style. So I used an AI editor called Cursor. In Cursor, if you know what you’re doing you basically go in and just through kind of prompting they’re called cursor rules you define all the boundaries of what you’re going to limit the AI really, I want you to do it in Python. I want you to have this deploy on Google Cloud Run. I want you to only use these libraries and this database. Don’t give me a mishmash of stuff. Focus in on these tools and now go, start pulling the Amazon advertising campaign structure and then start running time jobs to flip campaigns on and off, to do the day parting functionality. And so I actually wanted to understand what was happening with AI coding because I’ve been dabbling with it, and so this was a good kind of like substantial project, and it was amazing how fast it is. I mean clearly a 10x in productivity increase. Is it kind of problem-free? No, it’s hard to kind of wrangle the strange intelligence that LLMs are that are just brilliant in some ways and really dumb in other ways, and it’s kind of like managing an employee like. I’ve managed a lot of programmers in my career and it feels a little bit like managing a programmer who’s precocious but out of control right, but that’s what it is, you know and they write in the end code so fast that if you can corral them properly, you can develop software in one-tenth the time.
Bernie:
And so I think this changes everything when we talk about all the problems we’ve been talking about with robotics and automation. And how do we compete as a brand, how do we compete as a country, if we can be smarter and faster about applying AI? That’s where the real battle actually lies right now. And all these other battles whether we’ve won them or lost them in the past. I’ll tell you what there’s pre-AI and post-AI, and those battles are past. We’ve got a different set of battles ahead of us and we’re not in a bad position. I mean, we’ve got some of the best AI companies in the world or in the US. Yes, China has been way more focused on AI than we have at a national level for way longer. I mean, they’ve been investing at a national level in AI for over 20 years. We still don’t really have national investment in AI here. We’ve got private equity and traditional, you know, startup investment, but we’re, you know, we’re still doing well.
Bernie:
And yeah, so I think for each of us who are thinking about how do I build a company or how do I sustain my company this is the key question is how do I apply AI smartly, given where AI is right now? And that’s such a hard thing to track, because what AI is right now is changing month to month, you know, week to week, month to month.
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Bernie:
As we approach the singularity and, um, you know, and so, uh, you know, you, you mentioned, uh, you know, uh, retu java earlier. I, I like, I, I I’m watching everybody, including you, Kevin, and people like me too. You know the, the newsletters you’re just hungry for. You know these little tips and tidbits about what’s really working, what’s not, and almost every day, I get an unlock where I go oh, that’s working, I can do that. And now there’s a new kind of tool in the toolbox and we’re all getting like if you love this stuff. You’re getting new tools, new presence in your toolbox I mean heck practically every day now.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I don’t know what the answer is on that, but what I do know with and I would gamble almost everything on it is that, if you’re not, you said it exactly it’s how do you implement the AI to have that competitive edge and keep one step ahead by using the AI of everybody else, and I think that’s the competitive advantage that the smart businesses are going to have, no matter what they’re selling or no matter what they’re doing, and constantly be evolving, as the AI is constantly changing, and be flexible, and I think that’s where you’re going to see massive opportunities coming up and people that can come in and help businesses do that, I think, is going to be a major opportunity, and that’s something that I’m looking to double down on with a company I have called Dragonfish. That we were going to go one direction, but right now we still have a few things to figure out and I don’t know the exact answer, but I think we’re going to pivot and actually make that company do exactly what you just said come in and help people, fix these holes and put AI on top of things to actually take them to the next level and put these at least short-term moats if not long-term moats around them that’s going to allow them to compete.
Kevin King:
Well, Bernie, we could talk about this, I think, for another four hours and geek out on this stuff. This is cool stuff, fun. Hopefully those of you listening have opened your eyes a little bit and learned a few things from this. Bernie’s one of the smartest guys I know in the space and he keeps up with everything that’s going on. So what he says listen to go back and rewind this and listen to it again, download the transcript or something and read it and pass this episode on, because I think if you look back on this, put this in the vault and three, five years from now, come back and listen to this. I think you’re going to be like holy cow, those guys were onto something and they were right. So, Bernie, I really appreciate you coming uh and uh and sharing today. This has been uh, this has been great.
Bernie:
I always love talking to you, Kevin, thanks so much for having me on.
Kevin King:
And if people want to reach out or follow you, uh, or learn more about your thoughts and processes and anything else you’re involved in, uh, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Bernie:
Yeah, just reach out to me at [email protected], I’m mostly on LinkedIn. I’m actually again, I’m not a marketing guy, not a lot of sales stuff, but I will actually make a pitch for something. If anybody is interested in bringing manufacturing back to the US, I would love to have you reach out, because I think it is a big challenge and we’re being kind of forced to confront it and I’m happy to talk to anybody who’s interested in the same thing.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, thanks again, Bernie.
Bernie:
Thanks again, Kevin.
Kevin King:
The world is changing rapidly, right under our feet, and if you’re not evolving with it, you’re going to be missing out. There’s massive opportunities coming, but it takes a change of mindset, a change of culture and change of approach. But those that stay on the cutting edge of this and implement some of what Bernie and I just talked about and are very well-versed in this are going to be the ones that survive and prosper while a lot of people fall away. So I hope this episode has given you some really good things to think about and some good ideas. One of the smartest guys in the space that’s got a lot of experience really respect Bernie quite a bit. So thanks for joining us on this episode of the AM/PM Podcast. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome guest and another awesome episode. Until then, make sure you’re subscribing to my newsletter, billiondollarsellers.com. It’s free. Every Monday and Thursday I cover some of this kind of stuff with AI and everything. So if you want to stay on the cutting edge, that’s where you need to be, billiondollarsellers.com. Take care and we’ll see you all again next week.
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Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:
- Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Kevin King for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
- New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
- Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
- Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
- The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
- Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!
- Check out our other Amazon FBA podcasts including the Serious Sellers Podcast, as well as our Spanish and German versions!
- You can also listen to the AM/PM Podcast on YouTube here!