#476 – The Final Chapter: Kevin King, Guillermo Puyol, & the Untold Origins of Helium 10
Audio Version Above. Video Version Below
For the final time as host of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin King sits down with someone who helped change the course of his career and the Amazon seller world at large. In this emotional closing episode, Kevin welcomes Guillermo Puyol, the brilliant, behind-the-scenes architect who helped transform a small side project into one of the most influential software companies in e-commerce, co-founder of Helium 10.
Kevin and Gui go deep into the real origin story of Helium 10, from Manny discovering Amazon selling through Gui’s retail arbitrage side hustle, to the creation of early Helium 10 tools like Scribbles and Frankenstein, to the unexpected momentum that led to hockey-stick growth… and ultimately, a life-changing exit.
Along the way, they share never-before-told stories:
• Recording podcasts from closets and garages
• Manny Coats nearly being “kidnapped” (not really)
• Why the AM/PM Podcast existed before Helium 10
• The infamous April Fools episode that caused chaos
• The first Illuminati mastermind and the rise of Helium 10 Elite
• The emotional whiplash after selling a company
• And why both of them are now back in the startup trenches with AI
This episode is part history, part entrepreneurship masterclass, and part heartfelt goodbye as Kevin concludes his 3.5-year run as host, marking 180+ episodes.
Whether you’re an OG listener who remembers the early AM/PM days or someone new to the brand, this conversation gives you a rare, unfiltered look inside the building of a billion-dollar ecosystem and the people who made it happen.
🏁 Final Notes From Kevin
As I close out this chapter of the AM/PM Podcast and my 9.5-year journey with Helium 10, I want to thank every listener, guest, and team member who made this ride unforgettable. From the early days of tin-can microphones to global events and hundreds of episodes, this community has been the heartbeat behind everything we’ve built.
If you’d like to stay connected, continue learning, and go deeper into the world of high-level e-commerce, here are links to stay in touch with me.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-king-amazon/
https://www.youtube.com/@marketingmisfitspodcast
https://join.billiondollarsellers.club/bdss-club/
https://www.billiondollarsellers.com/
In episode 476 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Guillermo discuss:
- 01:47 – How AM/PM Launched Kevin’s Entire Amazon Career
- 04:46 – Why Guillermo Puyol Is the Perfect Final Guest
- 10:20 – The True Origin Story: Flappy Bird, Financial Struggles, & a Chance Connection
- 14:20 – Building the AM/PM Podcast to Build an Audience
- 18:40 – The Moment Helium 10 Scribbles Was Born (Because Manny Tanked His Sales)
- 21:35 – Naming Helium 10 the Night Before an Event
- 26:00 – The Rise of the Illuminati Mastermind to Helium 10 Elite
- 30:15 – The War Room Event That Changed Everything
- 38:25 – Fireball Bottles, Screwball Whiskey & Conference Traditions
- 41:05 – Watching Helium 10 Become a Global Giant
- 46:10 – Life After the Exit: Identity, Depression, & Reinvention
- 56:10 – The Founders Return: Manny & Guillermo Launching Kreator.ai
- 01:03:00 – Advice to Entrepreneurs in 2025
- 01:10:45 – Kevin Shares His Own Next Chapter
- 01:13:15 – A Final Farewell & Gratitude
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 476 of the AM/PM Podcast. This is the final episode of the AM/PM Podcast with me, Kevin King, as your host. I am moving on to other things. Helium 10 and I, after nine and a half years, are going in some different directions. It’s been a great ride. Helium 10’s been very good to me, and hopefully I’ve provided a lot of value to all of you guys as well. I still have another podcast, the Marketing Misfits Podcast that I do with Norm, so you can still catch me over there.
Kevin King:
My guest this week, I thought it fitting that the very first time I hosted the AM/PM podcast, I had Manny Coates, one of cofounders of Helium 10 on, and this time I have his other copartner and co-founder Guillermo Puyol is my guest to close this out. This is a great episode. Talk about the history of Helium 10, talk about what’s happening now, about being an entrepreneur, about the ups and downs of having a good exit, and a whole lot more. I think you’ll really enjoy this episode, especially you OGs that remember the good old days and no Manny and Guillermo. Enjoy, and we’ll see you on the other side.
Kevin King:
This week is a very special episode of the AM/PM podcast for a number of reasons. You know, I start I took over this podcast in June of twenty twenty two, it was. So about three and a half years now. I’ve been I think it’s about a hundred and eighty some odd episodes every single week. And what was unique about this me hosting this podcast is this podcast is actually what got me started being this, you know, so called guru or authority figure or teacher educator, whatever you want to call it in the Amazon space. Because back in I started selling on Amazon as a third-party seller in twenty fifteen. And back then, I was just keeping my head down launching five brands. And there’s this little Facebook group called the FBA high rollers. And it’s still around. And this group was a group that was around the originally, I think the AM/PM podcast and it eventually became part of Helium 10 and then it kind of evolved from there.
Kevin King:
But there I was I remember I was in in Miami. I was waiting for my now ex-wife to show up at the airport and I had some time to kill and I posted, I made a message in this group. And I basically was telling other people they’re full of BS because they’re saying something about landing pages. And I was like, no, that’s not how it works and this is how it works. You’re penalized. And I think Manny Coats who was one of the co-founders of Helium 10 saw that post and he reached out to me and he said, hey, Kevin, would you come on the AM/PM podcast? We got this new podcast couple months into it or something at that point. Would you would you be would you come on it? And I was like, I’ll listen to it, but you know, I I’m just a seller. He’s like, no, just come on the podcast. So I came on the podcast. I had like the worst headset, the worst microphone, the worst. It sound like I was in a tin can. It’s just I was sitting in my garage actually when I did it. And it was just it was just horrible. But that podcast resonated with a lot of people and it snowballed from there.
Kevin King:
And then as Helium 10 grew, Manny was getting a lot of requests to go and speak. He’s like, I don’t want to go and speak. I’m trying to grow a company here. Don’t have time to go to all these. And he was picking the good ones and just based on what his time was. And so he said, hey, I know this guy that was on my podcast. He can go and speak at some of these too. And so it’s like ASGGG and a few others. He said, I went and spoke. And that’s what set me off on this journey. And so when I took over the AM/PM podcast, I had Manny on as my very first guest. I think it’s episode 294. I thought that was right. And today, lot of you don’t may not know this, but this is the very last episode of me hosting the AM/PM podcast. I’ve been doing stuff with Helium 10 for about nine years, I guess. And nine and a half years, I guess, we had an official kind of a, like, relationship where they’re actually paying me money, and that’s that is now ending. So this will be the very last episode of me hosting the AM/PM podcast.
Kevin King:
I’m not sure what Helium 10’s gonna do. I don’t know if this podcast is going away. It’s just gonna be Serious Sellers with Bradley or if they’re gonna have a different guest or host come in. I’m not quite sure, but I wanna thank all of you for taking this journey with me and for coming on this and supporting this podcast. But today’s guest, I thought it was only fitting to actually bring the other co-founder of Helium 10. And this is a guy that’s always been behind the scenes. He he’s super smart. He’s one of the smartest guys I know on the planet. I mean, guy is like brilliant. And when it comes to marketing, when it comes to setting up systems, he’s a no bull a very one of the most honest, honorable guys I know, always doing the right thing. And he’s the other cofounder of Helium 10. You might have if you’ve been in this space for a while, you might have heard him on a couple of the early podcasts where he was on kind of like as the Ed McMahon or something. But I’m very honored to that he accepted my invitation to come on today and speak. Guillermo Puyol is his name, and I’m super happy to welcome you, man, to the podcast. How are you doing?
Guillermo:
Thank you, Kevin. Man, that introduction. You put me in a tough spot to fulfill those expectations, but I really appreciate you having me. I appreciate our friendship. Man, when you said it’s been over nine years, it blows my mind. It’s insane to me that it’s been so long since we started this thing.
Kevin King:
Well, I remember how we’ll get into the Helium 10, but just our relationship. I remember the first time we met in person. I actually I think I’d heard your name or maybe heard you on the podcast, but first time I met you face to face, it was a concern knock on my door. You he was a this guy shows up. This this guy shows up in my door knocking, where’s Manny? What is He’s like, I wanna and those aren’t his exact words. But see, it was something along those lines because back in twenty so I did the first pie. I was a guest. I think it was in March. We recorded it. I think it came out pretty quickly after that. March of twenty sixteen. And that summer, I think it was June or July. I can’t remember which month. Manny had come to Austin and you guys were meeting with the guys at Amazing.com, I think. That was the main purpose. But Manny had come out. I picked him up at the airport. We went and had barbecue. We went out that night and had a few adult beverages. And Manny, you know, he had maybe one too many and basically slept in. And you guys had a meeting or something the next day, and his girlfriend, now wife, Mary Anne, was trying to get ahold of him. Nobody could get ahold of him. You couldn’t get ahold of him.
Kevin King:
And all y’all knew was like this this strange guy whose Facebook profile picture was a dog, a picture of a dog. He had no idea what this guy looks like. And your best buddy and your business partner may be in some dungeon tied up at some guy’s house, and you’re you tracked me down. You remember that story?
Guillermo:
Oh, I do. I mean, I I thought you had I mean, we didn’t know you at all. So this dude from the Internet kidnaps my business partner. He’s nowhere to be found. Yeah. Definitely, it was concerning, but, shortly after, I mean, there there’s little things in life that, tell you gives you a lot of information. In that in that moment, whenever, in that trip, I don’t know if you recall that there was something wrong with my charger for my laptop or my battery or something. And you took it upon yourself to like, hey, Gui, I got this. And you drove to the Apple store, and you bought me the whatever I needed. So, it’s funny how little signals like that tell you the kind of person that you are. You dropped everything, and you helped me out. Help me out. I wasn’t in a bind, and you took care of that. So, I think it’s kinda cool how you start getting to know people and what they’re about. So that told me you were not a total weirdo. I mean, God, it’s kind of a weirdo.
Kevin King:
Yeah. And I think sometime right after that, y’all had the, y’all were growing, you started Helium 10, what, like 2015, right? Because you and Manny did some, like, other some gaming stuff together. That’s how y’all met. Right?
Guillermo:
Yeah. I think the first dollar that came through the system was April of 2016, but we have been working on it since end of 2015, I believe.
Kevin King:
Yeah. Because it was Manny was originally y’all were doing gaming stuff and then he saw this opportunity on Amazon. So, he kind of pivot and started an Amazon brand selling socks and diffusers and stuff like that. And then as part of that, he started the AM/PM podcast. Was the when you started the AM/PM podcast, was that the original intent? Was him just documenting his stuff or is that, hey, we need to build an audience to build a software tool or is it that that came later?
Guillermo:
How far back do you want me to go?
Kevin King:
Go back. Yeah. Let’s do it.
Guillermo:
Yeah. So, man, it actually goes back to Flappy Bird. So when Flappy Bird, the little birds going through the pipes, that game was successful, I found that the the programmer was a Vietnamese guy, and he was crushing. I think he was making, like, thirty five thousand dollars a day in ads. Wow. And I was, my wife and I were in a really tough spot financially. It was like a series of unfortunate events, and I didn’t have two pennies to wrap together. So, I looking at this success, was like, maybe I could do this. So, I started making a game, kind of a Flappy Bird clone, worked on it on my spare time, and finally released it and made a total of, like, three bucks. I don’t know. It’ll be I think it was horrible. It was just so bad. But it was enjoyable. I actually have fun, making the game. And so I was telling my wife, like, making a game is a gamble, and it was one that I couldn’t afford because I was putting a lot of time and energy and effort, and I didn’t have the funds to market it correctly. So I said, why don’t why don’t I just start making this for other people? So, I made myself available on Upwork or whatever it was called back then. And I this guy from Spain ended up hiring me for his game. So instead of replying, like, with a generic message to his job posting, I actually took the time to build a small prototype. I replied to him, and I noticed that he says something in Spanish in the in his post. So I gave him the answer in Spanish.
Guillermo:
So he ended up hiring me. We worked on this game together for about a year, and we got to know each other during this process. And towards the end of this process, which was, I think, Christmas 2014, He’s like, hey, Guillermo. It’s been great getting to know you. You definitely should meet my cousin. He’s a crazy guy from California. He has published hundreds of mobile games. You guys would get along really well. And I think he’s looking for a Unity developer right now. So he made the intro and his crazy cousin was Manny. And so Manny, in his own style, of course, we talked and he’s he told me, Hey, there’s I’m starting again, like, tomorrow. Take it or leave it. This is the offer. And I remember he actually wrote in the one pager contract. I told him, hey Dude, I can work with you, but I don’t have a iMac. All my builds are through a virtual computer. So in the-
Kevin King:
Are you going to, like, a library and doing it?
Guillermo:
No. I was actually working on a PC and because in order to build apps for Mac or for iPhone, you need a Mac to sign the build. So I would upload it, do it on a virtual computer, and it was a mess, man. So Manny actually wrote, this is the fee for the game, and out of the goodness of my heart, I will buy a computer. That was actually in writing.
Kevin King:
Oh, wow.
Guillermo:
So yeah. Yeah. So he bought a computer, and we started working together. And at first, there was very little communication because I was one of many. But we got to know each other through that process of building that game, and I would tell Manny, hey, dude I cannot work on the on the game this weekend. I have to go sourcing. And at first, he didn’t ask me what the hell I was talking about. But on the side, I would go to, like, garage sales and thrift shops and even Brick and Mortar, like, Targets and stuff like that to source items to either sell on Amazon for retail arbitrage, or I will sell them on Offer Up or eBay, whatever was the best place to honestly, to make ends meet because, as I said, we were in a really tough financial spot. So, we started talking about it, eventually, mine is like, what are you talking about? Like, what are you sourcing? What is that you’re doing? So I told him, like, I’m selling on Amazon. I’m selling on eBay, and this is the this is the process. And he’s like, well, there’s gotta be a better way. That sounds like a grind.
Guillermo:
I was like, there is. There is a better way. It’s called private label. So you have to go find a supplier, figure out, I mean, figure out what’s hot, find a supplier, slap your brand on it, and order half a container or a container and then try your luck. So, I can’t afford to order half a container. So that was kind of the seed behind this whole thing. During that year of building the game, the market for mobile games was getting super hard because there was this huge company like Zynga, and they were acquiring a lot of Indie developers, and they had a massive budget to, like, push games to the front. So the little Indie games were never seen. So at one point, honestly, have worked on the game very close to a year. Manny and I getting to know each other, getting along, liking each other, we realized that we had a lot of similarities in our background, doing affiliate marketing, doing inter marketing, doing things online, just kinda finding opportunities. Right?
Guillermo:
And I was on a trip away with my wife. Don’t remember when. I get a call from Manny, and he’s like, hey, Gabe. How do you feel about pulling the plug on the game and just doubling down this whole Amazon thing? You’ve been talking about it with, I don’t like how things are looking on the game space, but I feel like a lot of the things that we’ve learned in this space could translate to selling products on Amazon. So I said, I I like the idea, but I don’t like it as an employee. Because at that point in time, I was Manny’s employee contractor doing this. It’s the same thing. It’s like, I I’d be happy to join you as a partner. So we partnered up, and it was Manny was footing the bill for everything. So, it was a I was the thirty percent, he has seventy percent. And we started with the intention of building an audience. At one point in time, we started doing Periscope. Do you remember that?
Kevin King:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We did one here in Austin. Y’all were that 2016, that summer, was me, you, I think Mark, maybe, Brian Johnson, and we, like, jumped on Periscope at some bar.
Guillermo:
There you go. Yeah. So we started doing Periscope very close to the time of the beginnings of the podcast. So it was trying to find an audience, and the goal was to build Manny’s Amazon brand in public. Very transparently, talking about what he did right, what he did wrong. If he messed up, which was pretty often, we just talk about it. Instead of painting the everything sunshine and rainbow story, which a lot of people were doing that time, we just talked about what went right, what went wrong, and the goal was to build an audience around that and eventually monetize that audience. That was kinda how we started. Then at one point in time, because Manny was testing things and trying to trying some more, I think he set up a goal. I think it was twenty five thousand dollars in sales in the first quarter or something like that.
Guillermo:
And he did, like, seventy-five thousand in the first month. So, please don’t quote me on this. You can go back to the first episodes. I’m sure it’s all documented. The numbers are almost irrelevant at this point. But he was doing well, and at one point in time, he messed up his listing. He was trying to optimize it, and it was spreadsheet based. He messed up his listing, and he left one of the most important keywords out of the listing, and his sales tanked. And he’s like, what happened? He goes back and, like, oh my God. Like, the most important keyword he had forgot to put it back in. So that was the beginning of Scribbles. Manny saw the need, like, oh my god. I don’t wanna do this again. We have access to developers. And so he reached out to one of the developers, and I told him, hey. Create a tool that has all your keyword list on the left. And as I’m building the listing and as move moving things around, it makes sure that I don’t forget a single keyword. So that was the first tool of Helium 10 was Scribbles.
Guillermo:
And Manny said, oh, this is good. We can actually sell this. And I told him, yes. We could, but let’s not. Let’s give it away. So, because, again, we’re trying to build an audience and authority in the space. So, Scribbles was originally hosted on the AM/PM podcast website. And it was just enter your email address and then you could use it. So we did that, and people started noticing, oh, this is really cool. And there may have been other tools still.
Kevin King:
You had Frankenstein after that. Right?
Guillermo:
Was Frankenstein-
Kevin King:
I think Frankenstein was next.
Guillermo:
In the AM/PM or was it already under the Helium 10?
Kevin King:
I don’t remember. I don’t remember where that one was, but I remember it was Scribbles, Frankenstein, and think Index Checker was the third.
Guillermo:
And I think those three those may have been the first three tools, but that might have been already under the Helium 10 domain. But the fact is, we went to a, we were going to an event that I have purchased before starting the AM/PM podcast. And I had a plus one, and I told Manny, hey. I’m going to LA to this event. Do you wanna come? It was like a marketing event. It was all about building, like, up offline events. So, Manny came with me, and I met up with him at his apartment in California. That was actually the first time Manny saw me, and he almost drove he almost drove away. Apparently, he was intimidated by my thick eyebrows and my angry looks.
Kevin King:
That’s funny.
Guillermo:
Which is I don’t know. That’s another that’s a tangent that we can touch on later. But so we’re going to this event, and Manny was, hey we we’re telling people that we’re doing this podcast and we’re building the tools, but the podcast is different from the tools. We should kinda separate one from the other. And that’s when Helium 10 was born. Like, the night before that that event, we came up with a with a domain, with the name, and we printed business cards in LA, and right before the conference, we picked up the business cards and Helium 10 was born at that moment before that event. And then, you know you know the rest. It’s it was a wild ride.
Kevin King:
S,o I remember the ad. You started off, it was a it was a credit space system where you bought x number of credits and allow that allowed you to do so many searches or so many processes or whatever. And I remember, like, when an Index Checker came and you’re like, we need to do something here, but we have this credit system. And I remember one night, because you were in Houston at the time and you just had a new baby. And you were like, I remember Manny in his apartment in Orange County and Mary Anne bringing him, like, soups and stuff as he because it was on FaceTime or whatever we were using, Zoom or something. And she’d be, like, constantly bringing food because we’d be on these, like, four or five hour marathon calls. And you would be I remember at one point, you had to go in the closet in your living room, you know, behind your wife’s coats and dresses or whatever was in there because just to get some quiet because you had a newborn baby that was, you know, crying. And you had to do a couple of podcasts I think in there or something too. And we would sometimes I remember one time till like two in the morning, Texas time, Manny and I one time sat there and tried to break Index Checker where we actually took like every letter in the alphabet that starts with a z and I put it on Amazon listing all over the place to see if it would pick it up, you know, all these weird words that you normally wouldn’t get picked up.
Kevin King:
And then I meant I remember y’all you came to Austin and you’re like, hey, we got this idea for this thing. We’re gonna call it the Illuminati. And it’s this training because there’s other people at the time that were doing stuff charging like ten thousand or fifteen thousand or twenty five thousand dollars to Amazon sellers to come to these masterminds, and people were paying it. Big hand over fist back then. They don’t do that anymore, but they were paying a hand over fist. And you’re like, hey. We can start this thing. It’s modeled after Ben Cummings, I think. It had had something that he was doing similar monthly. You’re like, we’re gonna charge three ninety seven a month for it. It’s gonna be separate from our podcast and our tools. And Kevin, we I remember you originally, like, we want you to come on and teach some stuff. I’m like, why am I getting paid? He’s like, no. It’s just good exposure for you or some something like that. I was like, no. No. No. If you want me to come on and, you know, we gotta do it. So we we set up a partnership where it’s twenty five twenty five twenty five twenty five, I think. It’s twenty five percent to me, twenty five percent to you, twenty five percent to Manny, and twenty five percent to, like, overhead or the company or whatever for hosting and credit card processing and all that. And that started in February of 2017.
Kevin King:
And to this day, well, Helium 10 Elite, I just did my last one in November here. So ever since then, every single month, it got changed from Illuminati to Helium 10 Elite in 2019, the name, and it kinda got rolled into one of the packages at Helium 10. But that that’s happened and that’s where that started. I remember we first time we did it, we did a webinar and we, like, put, like, three or four hundred people in there. I like it was, like, hundred and something thousand dollars webinar. And we’re like, holy smokes. And you guys this is before Helium 10 took off. You’re like, holy cow. And I think correct me if I’m wrong, but I think you and Manny basically never took your percentages out. I think you all are using that to help cash flow some of the Helium 10 growth initially, if I’m not mistaken. And then all of a sudden, I think in summer of 2017, I believe, Helium 10 took off on this hockey stick growth. It just like exploded. And you guys had no time for Helium 10 for Illuminati anymore. And you’re like, Kevin, you just because in the beginning, you and Manny were both on there. Nanny would present something. I would do something. We’d have a guest. And then few months later, dude, you just gotta take this. You know, we’re busy with our other stuff.
Kevin King:
And then we would have these ebbs and flows. And it would be like, do a webinar and get three hundred members. And then they would slowly trickle out. Credit cards would decline and everything. And we get down to like a hundred. Well, I’m like twenty five percent would go from forty grand or whatever it was one month to like fifteen grand or something. You know, a few months later, I’m like, no. I need my forty grand again. And I’d reach out to you guys like, hey, we gotta do another webinar right now. We’re busy. We’ll get some other, you know, we’re building something else. Like, finally, you guys are like, alright. Alright. We’ll do a webinar. And so that was the growth of it. And then when you guys decided to sell and start then worked with Scott and decided to move that into Helium sales. I think the rationale was like someone might not want that if they’re a buyer. But if we roll it into a higher-level package and include it and give them some extra tools and access to stuff, that would make more sense and give us more leverage when the company is is sold. And so that’s when it became Helium 10 Elite and then we worked out an agreement that it’d be a flat rate every month for my piece and that’s continued on. But that was some interesting times.
Kevin King:
I remember going to something in Vegas. It’s Just One Dime, I think it was. And you guys sponsored it. I remember you and Manny going up on stage and doing something. And there’s like five hundred people in the room. And I remember afterwards, you’re like, we had four hundred I’m these numbers aren’t exact, but it’s some crazy numbers like this. We had four hundred and thirty of those people just sign up for Helium 10, you know, to try it out or whatever. It was some crazy you remember that? Some crazy number. As it’s just one dime event.
Guillermo:
I don’t remember.
Kevin King:
And then it’s crazy stuff that y’all are doing with amazing and with y’all just like everything you touch was you’re throwing frisbees out on stages and like I remember all that. Like, y’all it was like it was really good marketing and it wasn’t that you were the guy only guys in town because there was Managed by Stats. Jungle Scout was coming up around that same time and was doing pretty well. You had that one guy that ripped everybody off and I forget his name now that had that one tool. You had sellers all these Chinese based tools. So what was it that you think attributed to why Helium 10 kind of rose to it’s basically you and Jungle Scout. You had Viral Launch back then. Why did Helium 10 rise to the top back then? Back like 2017, 2018. What was it?
Guillermo:
Man, that’s a difficult question.
Kevin King:
Well, I think it was the way you guys executed. I don’t know if it was I don’t know if it’s luck. There were some key partnerships.
Guillermo:
I’ll tell you why I say luck. One of this is not mine, but I’ve heard the definition. One of the definitions of luck is when opportunity meets preparation. Right? So there was there was a lot of this jointedness in the Amazon space back then. There was a lot of tools all over the place, and there was the need to consolidate and bring people into one software suite to be able to manage their entire business. So I think we saw that opportunity. And when I say we, I’m generous. Manny is a brilliant dude. So there’s I oftentimes get credit for a lot of his genius. So I’ll take it, but he’s a brilliant guy.
Kevin King:
He’s a super smart guy.
Guillermo:
And so I think spotting that opportunity of, hey. This is all over the place and have to copy here and paste here and go here and research. So spotting that opportunity and, I guess, that our, both mine and my shared experiences of marketing in the past and positioning and doing the things that we had done prior to Helium 10 prepared us to kinda see that opportunity and grasp it. But there’s a lot of a lot of things that that happened to take Helium 10 to where it was.
Kevin King:
In a short period. I mean, it’s three years, but in time it really. About three years from the time it started to the time you guys exited for quite a bit of money.
Guillermo:
Yeah. Absolutely. The there was one thing I mean, there’s a lot of people that that were incredibly important in this process. And, obviously, at one point in time, amazing.com agreed to promote us. They were huge in the training space. So that definitely helped that growth and the and the awareness around Helium 10. There was also you mentioned the fact that Manny and I backed away from Illuminati. That was after attending an event here in Austin. I was a part of War Room mastermind, and it was War Room was marketing, and they had some operations, and it was all about growing businesses. And there was one session that Richard Lidner it was actually a breakout no. Not breakout. They called it Intensives. So they had the quarterly meetings, and they had intensives that they would do either in a hotel or it was just a very small session. So Manny and I came here with Manny’s now wife, and Manny actually got sick. He never went to this one session. But in that session, Richard talked about the book four disciplines of execution. And I took copious notes. They gave us these big old posters, like not posters, but paper. And it’s like, take notes in this paper. So something clicked in that session. And I went upstairs, and I’m like, bro, I’m sorry, I know you’re sick, but we’re working right now. So I slapped these papers all over his room. He’s, coughing and dying. And I’m like, we’re working.
Guillermo:
So and at that point in time, we had roughly six thousand paying members. And in that session, we laid out an initiative internally that was called 12k by three nineteen. We were setting out to double the number of paying members by March of 2019. And one thing we noticed was that we were lacking focus. We were I mean, there was a lot of authority in Helium 10. There was a lot of attention around it. We had a lot of kinda partner webinars. All good stuff, but it wasn’t always pointing at the growth of Helium 10. It’s like, hey, how can we help our customers and what are some cool things that that they can do, but it was it was not always-
Kevin King:
Yeah. As you’re doing like webinars for other people and taking like an affiliate commission.
Guillermo:
Right.
Kevin King:
And you’re doing this you Manny, he’s somewhere around that time stopped the podcast too. Right? And-
Guillermo:
That may have been a little bit after that. I’m not sure. But the fact is we decided, hey. We’re going to focus on just growing Helium 10, and it was a laser focus. And we one of the things that that book talks about is that if you go to a football game, like a high school football game, right, the scoreboard is super important because without a scoreboard, people don’t keep track of what’s happening in the game and they kinda get disengaged. Whenever you have a scoreboard and you can actually follow along with what’s happening in the game, you’re way more invested and more engaged. And that translates to our teams. So if they don’t see how their individual efforts affect the score of of the company, not just their own score, their team’s score, and the company’s score, they don’t feel as strongly about what they’re doing. But if you’re able to help connect the dots for them, like, how this is how your individual is scored, and this is how your efforts affect the team’s effort, and this is how the team effort is helping the company. And the current goal of the company is to double in number of paying users and everything connects, then they’re feeling more like they matter, which they do. Right? So something clicked in that in in that event. And so it’s kinda set us in that path of, like, laser focus. We stopped doing affiliate promotions for anybody. I think we had one that we had committed to prior to that, and then we stopped everything forward and just focus on growing. So it’s hard to answer why it happened, but there were some of these things that contributed to that to that growth.
Kevin King:
And I remember too, you guys, around 2017, I as you’re doing this big growth, it’s something I’ll never forget, and I’m forever thankful to you and Manny for is that in 2017, my company, I was managing five brands and we I was growing leaps and bounds. And back then, I had no rich uncle. I had no banks didn’t talk to you. I didn’t quite qualify for Amazon lending at that point because I think you had to have one year or two year I forget what it was. I was right on the edge. And then Amazon lending finally came in, but wasn’t enough money. They gave me, like, two hundred and fifty thousand or something. It wasn’t enough for me to keep the momentum going. So I took out all these crazy loans, you know, from people that would give me loans at the time with high interest rates. And I was making payments of, six grand a day on some of some of these loans. And then at the same time, I was getting married and the cost on this wedding in Columbia were getting out of hand. And I was like, I was kinda stuck. And so I remember coming to you guys and like, hey, any way I can get a advance, you know, on my payments for the Helium 10 Illuminati at that point. And all these yeah. It was Illuminati still. The only Illuminati. And you guys, I remember you drew up a little you said, yo. Let’s talk about it.
Kevin King:
You drew up a little agreement. And we were in Vegas at some other events. And I remember coming over to your place and like, you know, sign this. And then you wired a hundred and sixty grand into my account, you know, just based on that. And I was like, man, these guys are badass. These guys and I to this day, I still appreciate what you guys did on that. And, you know, the wedding was nice. The marriage didn’t work out, but I really appreciate you guys doing that because you didn’t have to do that. But you saw that my back was up against the wall and you came in and helped. So I really appreciate Becky for what you what you guys did there.
Guillermo:
And then I’m glad we could help, but as I mentioned before, it’s not you don’t do those kind of things for just anyone. So we trusted you. We because we knew you, you needed at the time, and you were good for it. So I’m glad that we could help at the time. And yeah. I mean, it there are some business deals that are just business deals, and I think what we have built with you is is a friendship. So we knew you needed a time of school that.
Kevin King:
So those little bottles of Fireball paid off. Me bribing you with little bottles of Fireball and whiskey paid off.
Guillermo:
Fireball, man. That was that was good time.
Kevin King:
Remember that? Every time we went to a conference, I we have bring these it became a tradition. At first, it’s kind of a joke.
Guillermo:
Yeah.
Kevin King:
And then these little fireball cinnamon whiskeys. I don’t think it’s actually real alcohol or some but it’s yeah. We bring these little bottles, and it was became like, how many could you drink or something one you know, at night after these conferences? And that became like the running thing at all of our events that we would just show up at. That was a yeah. That was some good times.
Guillermo:
We could have chosen something better than Fireball.
Kevin King:
Yeah. I know. We should have. Well, then Manny found that peanut butter. What’s that peanut butter?
Guillermo:
Screwball. Screwball.
Kevin King:
Yeah. I wish we had little bottles of screw they became, like, bottles of screwball every time we got together.
Guillermo:
But then I haven’t had a single drop of alcohol since June of 2024. But-
Kevin King:
Oh, yeah.
Guillermo:
Screwball, I still miss, man.
Kevin King:
Yeah. That’s that was some good stuff. I think I still have a bottle or two here, because I think I bought a case of it at one point. It should throw it.
Guillermo:
It’s so it’s so good. My wife went into this health kick, and she stopped drinking, like, three years ago. And neither her nor I were ever heavy drinkers, just kinda social drinkers. But I started feeling it more, I guess, with age, and I would feel, oh, I had a couple drinks last night, and it was just not myself the next day. And as my kids are getting older, I also want to want to be an example for them because it’s words are cheap. Right? So you can tell these kids, do this, do that, and they’re in one ear out the other. Kids do as they see. So I also wanted to be a better example. So I have completely cut out even scribble out of my habits.
Kevin King:
Nothing wrong with that at all. Setting a good example is always always good. You remember the we decided to do an event for Illuminati because everybody is doing these, like, ten thousand dollar events, and we decided to do an event. And I remember May, he’s like, oh, I know a great place. I went with my ex-girlfriend to this place in Mexico that has, like, rivers going through it, let’s do it there. So me, you, and him, ended up Mark flew down there to do a check. And then in May of 2017, I think it was we actually held the first events. Helium 10 it was Helium 10 event down in in Cancun. I remember when you’re doing this, we’re doing this event, you guys had the idea. I was like, oh, yeah. I’ve done a bunch of these. I’ve done a whole bunch of events in the past. You know, my buddy Mark is a photographer. We did, a Million Dollar model search, and he could help us produce it. And I think Manny was like, no, I got this girl. She says she’ll do the whole thing for three grand. Yeah. Or what I was like, Manny, I don’t think that’s what you want, but you can get what you pay for. But and then I convinced you guys somehow. I don’t remember how to let Mark come in. And then we get down there and you open Manny opens you and Manny open the door and Manny’s like, holy cow. And then that that thing, the thing then gets pulled off. We end up doing another one in Hawaii about a year later. And that one Manny’s like, here Mark, just take it, run with it. And then when you guys exited Helium 10, you kinda set me up, you know, to keep running the Helium 10 Elite and doing the Freedom Ticket and doing that kind of stuff.
Kevin King:
But the events were those were some pretty cool times. I mean, the one we did in Hawaii and the one in Cancun. I mean, there’s story we could sit here and tell stories all day long about that Cancun event with the power going out and we having to fire the host halfway through it and everything. That’s where I met my buddy Norm. He came to that event and he and I do a podcast and we have a business together now. So a lot of stuff came out of that, those early days and you know, some of those people have moved on now and aren’t in the business anymore. But some of those people are still around. So it Helium 10 has made a huge impact on a lot of people’s lives. And I remember just about a year and a half ago or two years ago almost now, out shooting the Freedom Ticket 4.0. So, the first Freedom Ticket was done in 2017 and it was right before my wedding. And before I came to you guys to get that hundred and sixty grand, I was like, I need some more money. What can I do? And I was like, well, maybe I’ll just do a course because there’s just a lot of bull courses out there, so I’ll just do a course. So, we shot the first Freedom Ticket. I think you came up you guys came up with a name, sent me the logo. Like, we’re actually shooting. Hey. Can you put this logo and push it up on the screen? And we’re shooting it during a hurricane in Austin.
Kevin King:
Like, literally, the four days we’re shooting, there’s a hurricane. The roof was shaking, and it was kind of a low budget kind of shoot. And then it evolved into Freedom Ticket two, three, and four with updates and much more professional shooting. I remember as it’s out at Nirvana at Freedom shooting Freedom Ticket four with Bradley, and we went to an event for Pacvue. So if those of you don’t know what happened is a company called Assembly came in and purchased Helium 10. It was a venture capital basically type of company came in and bought Helium 10 from you and Manny. And then they bought a couple other companies, rolled those kind of up almost like a little mini aggregator. And then one of those companies that they bought was Pacvue, which was a big enterprise level PPC company run by Melissa Burdick and another person. And they a few years later, that became they did some shuffling on paperwork to raise some more money and then, you know, a whole little process there where now it’s Pacvue. Assembly is kinda out of the picture. Pacvue took it over and kinda bought out and it’s now Pacvue as a corporate name. So Pacvue was having this event in LA where they had all their sales reps from, like, all over the United States. There’s like a hundred and something people at this mixer. And these are not all just the United States. I’m sorry. All over the world. So it’s people from Korea that were the Pacvue rep in Korea and this one from Singapore and this one from wherever.
Kevin King:
And Bradley and I went after we shot that day, and we just stood around in there. Nobody knew who the hell we were. Like, one person, I think. Melissa, I did. Everybody else, we’re just looking. And Bradley and I look at each other, and we’re like, look at this. This is something that Manny and Gui built. Started out as this little Scribbles thing, and now it’s this huge corporate thing where there’s like a hundred people in here from all over the world, reps and representatives, and they have no idea who the founders, what started this whole thing or what what went into it. It was just kind of amazing. It’s kind of one of those moments where, like, it’s it was kinda cool to see, like, how this little Helium 10 with yee in his closet and Manny with his girl bringing soup to him evolved into this huge corporate entity now worth over a billion and a half bucks or whatever it is right now. And it’s crazy. So how does that make you feel knowing that your little thing or is that you’ve been removed enough now, you don’t really pay attention to it or you probably you still have a little stake. You probably pay a little bit of attention. But how does that make you feel seeing it the evolution of everything?
Guillermo:
It’s humbling. It’s cool. But it’s it’s also important to say Manny and Gui built this is unfair and then completely ignores all the efforts of everybody that have actually built this thing. Even early on, there was a team of developers making this vision turning into reality. There’s I still remember the early days of Helium 10. We hired Rich, which was our first hire. It was I believe he’s still working with Helium 10. So, it’s little by little putting pieces to the puzzle and growing the team. So it feels great whenever the company goes way bigger than you as an individual. But it’s not it’s not fair to say Manny and Gui build this thing. It’s there’s so many people that have done so many things right. There’s also been a fair share of mistakes made by ourselves and the people that have taken it over. That’s just the nature of entrepreneurship. There’s a lot of a lot of mistakes made, and it’s just being okay with making mistakes and correcting them and changing course and kind of going with the flow.
Guillermo:
But, yeah, it’s really cool to see it. Now I could almost guarantee that I walk into the Helium 10 office and nobody knows who I am except maybe a couple people that were there in the WeWork days. And I mean, that’s kinda cool. Whenever I can secretly say, hey. I used to work there before. Yeah. And that actually has happened to me a couple of times. I have a I’m a sucker for merch. So and having Helium 10 merch is cool to me because it’s kinda a reminder of where I’ve been. And I’ve had my Helium 10 backpack on me before, and they’re like, oh, you sell on Amazon? I used to. That’s why say because there are some I try to add value to conversations whenever I can, but I’m not one to enjoy being on the on the spotlight. So, like, you I’m the fact that I’m here talking to you is out of my comfort zone in in that sense because it by design, Manny would pull me in. Actually, I went back and checked at AM/PM Podcast when is the earliest episode I appeared in, and the earliest that I found, was episode 20. But, I don’t know if I did something before that, but Manny kept trying to pull me into the podcast, and I kept like, no. No. No. You got it. You got it. You got it.
Kevin King:
So The best one y’all ever did, you got, I think, is that April fool’s day one.
Guillermo:
Oh, God.
Kevin King:
Or you guys came you came I think I just interviewed. I was listening to the podcast before I interviewed because I found it interesting. Like you said earlier, Manny was sharing his numbers and how things were going. And I was like, this is kinda cool. Kind of under the hood look. And y’all did an episode and it was April fool I don’t I think it came out in April fool’s day or right around April fool’s day. And you got me because I remember actually calling Manny and saying, what the hell? And he’s like, Kevin. Tell everybody what that was. That was great.
Guillermo:
Man, it was, we got so much heat for that because we just wanted to do something fun. So, we did an episode of everything that that’s working right now in the Amazon space, and we tried. We’d really tried to make it as ridiculous as possible to make it very evident that this was just us messing around. And I don’t remember everything that we said. I do remember that one of the things that converts, like, increases your conversions by, I don’t know, three hundred percent is including uppercase sevens in your title. So and we got messages like, what’s an uppercase seven? How do I use it? So at the very end of the episode, we say, hey, guys. If you haven’t noticed yet, check the date. Today is April fools. We’re just having fun, blah blah blah. It turns out people don’t listen to the entire thing. They listen to something that they went right to try to implement. And there was there was so much hate, like, hey. You guys are wasting our time, blah blah blah. Like, it ended up I thought, I was thinking we had to delete it, but now I’m thinking that might still be there, but then we had to edit the audio file and change it, to Manny while you are about to listen was a beautiful joke or something along those lines. Yeah. That was that was, that’s Manny’s creative brain. Like, he thinks outside the box. He’s very, very, very creative. So we’ll think of do that kind of thing. At one point in time, we also did the helium infused beer. Do you remember that?
Kevin King:
Yeah. I remember that. Y’all did the yeah. Y’all were talking with a high-pitched voice on the podcast.
Guillermo:
Yeah. So we, that was we did the little video with helium infused beer, and people were, where do I get that?
Kevin King:
But y’all did that in the off in the early days, you had the contest, right, with like hot sauce. Didn’t y’all have like hot sauce contest? Then you had the tequila room when y’all moved into Irvine? Like, so y’all always made it not just about the business, but you made it about having a little fun too.
Guillermo:
We tried. I hope there are some of the early team members that have fond memories of those times. I certainly do. But things are maybe different from their place and our place. We try to make things fun for the team as well because we were working hard. There was a lot of really long hours, really long days. I always say jokingly when people say, oh, you built from scratch and exited within three years? Yes. And it took us 10 years to do it. Right? Because we worked so much during that time. So it felt like a really long time. So we tried to do cool things for the team during that 10k by three nineteen that I mentioned earlier. We had put stats on monitors, very, very visible for the team. And the goal was for them to be aware of the stats. And if anybody noticed a record setting day, for example, they would grab this thing and, like, hit a gong. And if they were the first ones to hit the gong, they would get a bonus, and then there would be a spinning wheel of prices. And some of the prices were for, like, the entire team, like, hey. Half day off on Friday or we’ll all go watch a movie here. Things like that to try to keep like, break the monotony of the hard work. So I’m sure we made a lot of mistakes along the way, but we also tried hard to make it an enjoyable work environment.
Kevin King:
So what led to you deciding to exit? I remember Manny we’re at a conference in Vegas. I can’t remember which one it was, like, 2018 maybe? Late 2018. He came to me and he’s like, hey, what do you think about selling the Illuminati? I was like, I don’t know, man. Don’t know if anybody will buy this. Yeah. And we’re thinking about doing something with it. And then shortly after that, you know, things started changing really rapidly where I think Scott Dietz came in. Actually, it was a pike it was a Illuminati monthly training and Scott Dietz came on as a guest. And he was talking about the most money you make is when you exit your business. And I think y’all’s approach, to some things or your, perspective changed a little bit after that and things started switching. Can you kinda walk me through that process of what happened to lead up to the big exit in September of 2019?
Guillermo:
Yeah. Manny approached me one day, and he said, hey. How would you feel about exiting the business? And we were, like you said, hockey stick. There was hockey stick growth in the company, and things were happening. And my very recent financial struggles were kinda gone up. As I mentioned, I was I was in a tough spot, and we’re making money, and things were great. But it was space that was changing fast, and there was, Amazon’s a huge company. So, there was definitely platform risk there. We were a software company for Amazon sellers. So, if at any point Amazon decided to do something that could hurt our business, we would be left holding the bag and you’ll never know right? But then there was also great signals of potential growth. So, do we continue this riding this rocket ship, or do we take chips off the table? And I actually remembered, my dad telling me one time, la ambición rompe el saco, which translates to, ambition breaks the sack. The so he was telling me the story of, hey. If a pirate goes in and finds a treasure and, like, starts filling the his burlap sack with all the gold coins, he has to know when to stop filling or else when he pulls up to take the loot away, the entire bag breaks and and he’s left with nothing right? So that lesson from my dad kinda started playing on repeat in the back of my head after Manny said this.
Guillermo:
And, yeah, talking to Scott, we started looking at potential deals, and it made sense for us at the time to take chips off the table. It was a life changing amount of money. So, you never know. I mean, if things would have been way better down the road. I mean, thank you. It seems to be doing great and things are things are growing, but I never know if we would have been in the same situation. That would be that would take credit away from what they have done and all the team that they have put in place. So that kinda what led the things and also to be honest, Manny and I were tired. Like, really, really tired. We were working really long hours trying to make this thing work. So-
Kevin King:
And you wanna spend time with your family too. I mean, you basically you have several young kids and a wife that were supporting you to do all this crazy amount of hours, but you didn’t have as much time as you would like to spend with them either, I don’t think.
Guillermo:
Yeah. My kids were little. My wife was holding down the fort at home, and I was always trying to be there for the special occasions, but I was missing out on the day to day because it’s like, I would be there for the PTA meetings and the school functions and that kind of thing, But they, I was working from eight to eight, and I would call that a short day. You know? So, yeah, there was also a little bit of that that burnout element. There was, I say, taking chips off the table. It was a, like I said, a life changing amount of money. So there’s a lot of things. I cannot tell you it was the best decision, but it was the best decision at the time.
Kevin King:
So a lot of people we I just had someone speak at my event in Iceland, my Elevate 360 event. She talked about a lot of entrepreneurs when they hit that big exit. It’s not everything they it’s cracked up to be. Yeah. It’s life changing money. You know, you don’t gotta worry about paying the rent or your kids going to college or whatever it may be. But it’s also it’s almost like something’s missing in your life. Like you’re you work in these eight to eight or eight to twelve, you know, whatever. And it’s like something is missing and there’s often, you know, sometimes people go into depression or they go they bounce back and they get bored. They say, I’m gonna go sit on the beach or go travel. And then they’re like three months later, this is boring. I need another challenge. I need something else to do. How was that process for you? Manny, with both of you kinda withdrew from the space. You appeared here or there at a couple of things. You had to stay on for like six months. But then what was that that transition? I know then you went into the bulls and apes and did that project when NFTs were kinda cracking and y’all applied your creativity and your software skills to that. But how what was that like that you’re hitting that big plateau and then like almost sometimes feel like you’re almost crashing down or am I, you know, am I worthy of this or whatever the feelings may be. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Guillermo:
Yeah. Absolutely. There’s I don’t everybody talks about the big exit as the finish line. As an entrepreneur, that’s what you’re striving for. You’re trying to grow and make a difference and and eventually exit. And what I didn’t realize is how much of my identity was tied to being an entrepreneur and truly to being a co-founder of Helium 10. So the moment that we exited, it’s kinda like that part of my identity was gone, and then I was like, who, like, who am I? What I like, what am I now? Because people would ask me, what do you do for a living? Oh, the damn thing. I’ll be like, you know, it’s like and saying I’m retired at forty felt weird. So it definitely took a while for me to kinda change the way I was thinking about myself. And truthfully, I did go into a depression, and then COVID hit, and I have health anxiety. So that actually that depression and the not working and the health anxiety and looking at all the news and everything, it put me in a in a bad emotional state. And from the outside, it you’re probably thinking, wow. Cry me a river? Like, you’re in a the, like, great situation. I’m so sorry about you. But, unfortunately, money is not everything, and it put me in a really weird spot. And Manny was, come on, dude. Like, he’s always, like, uplifting and talking about he sees the glass half full. So he’s the one that that was kinda pushing, Let do something together. So, when NFTs came about, I didn’t know anything about them, but he’s like, alright. Come on, dude. Like, we’re starting this thing. You want in or not? We started that, unfortunately, right after we started things took I mean, the market tanked for NFTs. And we’re trying to do a lot of creative things like.
Kevin King:
It was very creative. I mean, what y’all are doing was really cool.
Guillermo:
I didn’t know the space, and I didn’t realize prior to, like, actually being in the thing how scammy, how kinda nasty the whole space was. There was a lot of a lot of issues there. We tried to like, we did the feedback guarantee to try to like, in Helium 10, our internally, we told we told the team members, like, we don’t want the customer’s money unless they’re thrilled to give it to us. So if they ever we had it maybe, I don’t know, a thirty-day money back guarantee or whatever in writing, but the team was always trained like, hey. If you ask for your money back, just hand it to them. We wanted people thrilled about this. So, I wanted to translate the same thing to the NFT space. So, we had the e-back guarantee, which people looked at us crazy, like, what do you mean? And we did things with the gamification, the creativity, and everything.
Guillermo:
We added that real utility of because Manny was really into the angel investing space with VC, so we tried to bring that into the equation. But, ultimately, the marketing the market psychology is that kinda get rich quick and that mentality and then things change in the market as a whole. So that is kind of chill. I don’t know if I can say that say that here, but it was it was a mess, man. And, ultimately, we had to hand the product back to the team, for the team to run-in the with the community, but it was not, it was a lesson. So, I’m I was trying to look at my failures or mistakes as lessons. That was definitely a lesson to be learned. Because whenever you’re in entrepreneurship, you cannot let the mistakes and the and the failures define you, you have to learn from them and iterate, iterate, iterate, and always try to learn from your previous mistakes and, of course, correct and do things differently in the new ventures. But it’s I mean, if you’re not comfortable with failure as an entrepreneur, then go get a job.
Kevin King:
So just recently, I know you had you started the company with your brother that does some Disney stuff for the Latin American market and you got that going. And you’ve been doing just some investing and things. But you recently you and I and Mark and your daughter went to a couple different events in the marketing space and you’re kinda helping her kinda discover what she might wanna be doing. But just by being exposed to some of that stuff, do you see does that kinda reenergize you or remotivate you a little bit to like, hey, maybe I wanna do something here with this AI stuff or maybe I wanna do something here with this or is that kinda like getting some juices back or you’re like, yeah, I’m kinda done that. I don’t need to do that. I’m just gonna go to the ranch and ride four wheels and let my daughter make her own way and I’ll support her. What do you think where do you see the big opportunities are out there right now? I mean and from just your outside view, you know, I know you’re not deep in the weeds a lot of this right now, but for people in the e-com business that are listening to this or people that are just entrepreneurs in general, what do you think are some big opportunities that people might wanna pay attention to?
Guillermo:
Yeah. I’m not in the outside anymore, Kevin. We’re back in the startup grind. So, Manny and I have partnered up. So, again, we’re doing this thing with AI. There’s-
Kevin King:
Is that the video stuff?
Guillermo:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kevin King:
Okay.
Guillermo:
And we can go back-to-back to that. But this morning, I was thinking I wanna go buy a domain. Man, I was thinking about it. The homeless genie is what I was thinking.
Kevin King:
Homeless genie?
Guillermo:
Because here’s the thing. I don’t think the AI genie is going back to the bottle. Like, the genie is officially homeless. He’ll never go back to the bottle because AI is just changing the space. Like, every space is going to change with AI, I believe. And you can be one of those naysayers and, like, no. You’re wrong this but I think the right is in the wall. And every business that out there is going to, in some way, be influenced by AI, some perhaps more than others. But if you’re resisting it, I think you’re becoming obsolete fast. So I wanted to bring my daughter to this event because she just graduated high school. She started college. She went and got a job at Target, kinda hated it, quit before I could talk to her. So I’m like, look. There’s having a job is difficult. Being an entrepreneur is difficult. So you gotta choose which difficulty you want. They’re all difficult. Life life’s hard, and there’s you just cannot choose your heart, like, being so I wanted to expose her to some of these opportunities and being in the room with people that are playing the game, can open your eyes. I was not in one of those rooms for a long, long, long time. I wanted to be. I just couldn’t afford to be in the in those rooms. So I wanted to bring her and kinda expose her to conversations and to, talks from people that are actually changing the world, from their little corner of the world right?
Guillermo:
So what’s in the future? I believe AI is going to majorly change how things are done, and that’s what we’re trying to do. Like, the little video thing that I was telling you, yeah, Manny and I is starting at kreator.ai. Creator with a k, kinda like Kevin King. So creator.ai, our goal is to make marketing more effective for seven and eight figure ecommerce brands. And we’re starting with commerce just because that’s what we know, but think this can have applications in many different verticals. By leveraging existing video models and injecting some of our marketing know how, I think we can make creative that actually scales. We we’ve had conversations with ecommerce brand founders that hit that wall. Like, they find a creative that works when they turn out the volume, it like, stops working. It doesn’t scale well. And it’s a lot of time and effort and investment to produce these ads consistently. So we’re our goal is to help them with AI, get more advance and get more video ads out there so that they can iterate quickly and find those winners faster. So we’ll be working with that. And we’re actually working with Matt Clark from Amazing. So he’s also part of Kreator. So he’s very much, like, he has the finger on the pulse because he’s running large ecommerce brands, so he understands the needs. So that’s what we’re working on right now. And, man, it’s hard to keep up with the with the changes. So there’s so much.
Kevin King:
Yeah. It’s like every day is something new.
Guillermo:
Every day, there’s something new, and there’s a new breakthrough, and there’s a new model. And so I’m actually considering following your footsteps and putting together a newsletter for all things AI and marketing how AI helps the marketing of ecommerce brands. So that’s something that I think people can look forward to shortly because they I feel like the newsletter forces you to be up to date with everything that’s happening.
Kevin King:
Yeah. I’m more up to date on everything. AI, ecommerce, Shopify, video production than I would if I wasn’t doing a newsletter twice a week.
Guillermo:
Yeah. So we we’re still in pre alpha with Kreator. And then again, kreator.AI with a k. And we we’ll probably open up a wait list for people that will have to curate who gets to play with it at first. But yeah. It’s so I’m no I’m no longer retired, Kevin. I’m back to the startup grind.
Kevin King:
Back to the startup grind again. I love it. I love it. It’s like someone asked me the other day. It’s like, Kevin, if you because I haven’t had a big exit. You know? You guys are like my goal, my idol or whatever. Like, I wanna only exit. So, I’m building dragon. You know, you can’t really it’s hard to exit a newsletter business. Hard to exit, you know, Helium 10, I never had any ownership or anything. And so, you know, I’ve been basically like a independent con I’m an independent contractor, not an employee, but independent contractor and just getting paid. And it’s been nice. And you guys definitely took care of me there. But and then my own brands, you know, I have one that I could exit, but it’s not one of these, you know, life changing exits. So that’s what I’m doing with Dragonfish right now with Norm as we partner up and we’re special specialize in an email marketing because most ecommerce people have no clue how to properly do email. And this is not newsletters. This is actually helping them sell products through email and build lists and stuff. And the mark then we’re doing AEO, you know, the AI side of things to get them into all this, the search engines and all of the LLMs and everything. And optimize on Amazon as well like with Rufus and Cosmos.
Kevin King:
So those two things and we think, you know, we can build that. You know, we have a hundred and at the time of this recording, a hundred and forty six people on a wait list and we just took our first five beta clients. We’re kind of building the plane as we fly it, but we think that can grow and maybe I can have a big exit and buy a ranch next to yours, you know, buy that extra one day, buy that extra piece of property that’s sitting out there next to your ranch. That that would be that would be nice. But, hey, Gui, I really appreciate you coming on here and sharing with me and being my taking the honor to be my last guest. That’s really I really appreciate it. Really appreciate you coming on and sharing and getting outside of your comfort zone and doing this to help me wrap up my Helium 10 journey that’s completely over. It’s, you know, it’s been a good ride. It’s been a lot of fun. Learned a lot, but it’s time to move on. And I really appreciate you coming on and helping me close this out in the right way.
Guillermo:
And thank you. Thank you again for the invitation. And on behalf of everybody that has ever listened to you speak at events, in the podcast, in every everywhere that where you have appeared, I wanna thank you for what you’ve done for every one of those brands, every one of the people that work for those brands. Sometimes you’re there in your little nook of the world and speaking behind a a computer, but it’s hard to appreciate the level of impact that you have on people. And I know, I mean, people have no clue who he is, but everybody knows Kevin King. So I think I think you’ve done you’ve done amazing. So congrats on that, and thank you for always being there for everybody and being relevant and up to date with all the information. So you you’ve done a great job. I’m sure there’s a lot of future ahead for you. But yeah, man. I can’t wait until we share another non-alcoholic drink.
Kevin King:
We’ll go virgin fireballs. Virgin fireballs.
Guillermo:
Yeah. Fire fireballs. Man, this is gonna be like cinnamon tea or something.
Kevin King:
Yeah. Cinnamon tea.
Guillermo:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, we need to hang out, Kevin. I know you still haven’t been to the to the ranch. We need to get you driving one of those side by sides and see-
Kevin King:
Yeah. For sure.
Guillermo:
How that feels. Well, thank you. Thank you again. Send my best to Norm and the on the other podcast. And I know that Mel is probably gonna be editing this video. He was another one of the Helium 10 OGs. So, what’s up, Mel?
Kevin King:
Awesome.
Guillermo:
Thank you, man, Kevin.
Kevin King:
Appreciate it. Take care.
Kevin King:
That was great. Awesome conversation with Guillermo. Really good guy, really good entrepreneur, really sharp guy. One of the best men I know. So, I hope this was a little bit of a look inside for you, inside how Helium 10 got up and rolling, how it’s rocking and rolling now, and how a little company that Manny and Guillermo built has then been taken over by others and grown into even a more massive company. I want to say thanks to everybody at Helium 10 who’s been working with me along the way. Appreciate it, Mel, all the hard work that you’ve done editing this podcast over the years and taking out all my oomphs and ahs and all my mess ups. Thanks to Bradley for helping make this happen and for his support over at Helium 10 on the Freedom Ticket and making sure I didn’t say cuss words and babysitting me on each one of those to make sure was a good boy, because sometimes I can actually not be a good boy. And to Carrie Miller and to Shivali, who have also come on and helped, to all of you that are in the Helium 10 Elite, and to the team Francis and some of those that have helped with the Helium 10 Elite, I appreciate all your help and assistance there.
Kevin King:
If you want to still stay in touch, subscribe to my newsletter, billiondollarsellers.com. It’s free every Monday and Thursday. I have the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, big event coming up in Nashville in April, and April eighth to the twelfth. About seven hundred people or so will be at that event. And then I also have the Marketing Misfits podcast as well with Norm. So, I’m not leaving the podcasting world, just moving on to a separate thing on my own with Norm. So thanks again to everybody who’s made this possible. Thanks for everybody who’s been joining me along this Helium 10 and AM/PM podcast journey, and I will see you all around. Take care.
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