#450 – Building Rockets and Brands: Jerry Vida on Scaling Smarter with AI & Data
Join us for an exciting conversation with Jerry Vida, an 8-figure Amazon seller with 17 years of e-commerce experience and a rocket-building hobby on the side. He shares his remarkable journey of navigating the Amazon landscape and achieving substantial sales success. Jerry opens up about his transition from struggling with PPC agencies to founding his own successful PPC agency. He recounts a pivotal moment from a Helium 10 Elite hack that helped him optimize lightning deals scheduling and significantly boost sales. Together, we reflect on the power of actionable insights, the role of AI in business, and the value of staying informed through curated content like newsletters.
As we explore the future of e-commerce, we discuss the transformative impact of AI technology on the industry. From reducing the need for large teams to enabling data-driven decision-making, AI is reshaping the way we analyze products, develop customer profiles, and create targeted marketing content. Listen in as we examine the shift from traditional keyword-based systems to intent-based models that better understand customer behavior and preferences. By leveraging AI and real-time data, we can craft compelling narratives that resonate with diverse buyer personas and ultimately enhance branding and marketing strategies.
Finally, we tackle the intricacies of maximizing profitability on Amazon, emphasizing a holistic approach that considers all aspects of the Amazon ecosystem. We touch on the debate between flat fees and profit-sharing models in agency partnerships and the importance of selecting high-quality clients. Additionally, we discuss strategies for leveraging Amazon as a powerful tool for customer acquisition, using product inserts and targeted marketing sequences to build a loyal customer base. Throughout this episode, Jerry and Kevin share insights from their own experiences and highlight opportunities for elevating e-commerce ventures to new heights.
In episode 450 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Jerry discuss:
- 00:00 – E-Commerce Expert Discusses Amazon Success
- 02:06 – Lightning Deal Hack Success Story
- 04:21 – Benefits of Industry-Focused Newsletters
- 09:08 – AI Technology in E-Commerce Growth
- 10:41 – Engineers Excel in E-Commerce Sales
- 17:52 – Maximizing Profitability Through AI Technology
- 20:52 – Switching From Agencies to Internal PPC
- 25:15 – Maximizing Profitability With Amazon Strategies
- 28:13 – Maximizing Profitability Through Amazon Optimization
- 31:54 – Future of E-Commerce
- 37:38 – Optimizing Product Listings for Multiple Avatars
- 44:02 – Leveraging Amazon for Customer Acquisition
- 47:39 – Rocket Science and E-Commerce Integration
- 48:12 – Description of Visuals on YouTube
- 53:14 – Rocket Launch Safety and Precautions
- 55:33 – Unlocking Success in E-Commerce
Transcript:
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 450 of the AM/PM podcast. I’ve got a rocket scientist on this week who’s been doing e-commerce about 17 years and then about five years ago was bouncing around between PPC agencies. Just couldn’t get anybody to do it right and so he decided to start his own.
But he still sells today, still doing a hefty millions of dollars per year selling on Amazon and also is helping others, a select group of people, manage their PPC not just their PPC, but their entire ecosystem. When it comes to Amazon, we talk about AI, we talk about how to do that some of the cool stuff that’s happening right now in the space. I think you’re going to really enjoy this episode with Jerry Vida.
Kevin King:
Mr. Jerry Vida, how are you doing, man, good to see you.
Jerry:
Yeah, I am excited to be here. I’m good, it’s an honor. I have followed a lot of your stuff for a long time, so I’m excited.
Kevin King:
Yeah, you came up. I think we had we were brothers at the Prosper Show. We were our booths. We’re both Prosper Exhibitor Virgins. This past month we had booths right next to each other. I guess that’s what happens when you know we get stuck over in the corner. When you’re a brand new exhibitor, you don’t get the pick of the lot of the best places, but we were next to each other and I remember you coming up to me and you saying hey, Kevin, I’ve been following you and you know I hear that quite a bit because at Helium 10 and you know, 220,000 people have gone to the Freedom Ticket and so many other stuff that I do but then you’re like you know what you made me, millions of dollars.
Jerry:
Yes.
Kevin King:
And I’m like what? What? You got my ears, my ears perked up. You’re like yeah, you said something on some webinar or something a few years ago and we implemented it and we made millions of dollars. What was that again?
Jerry:
So we were part of the Helium 10 Elite and I was watching the webinars that you were doing for it and at the very end there was a ninja hack and basically what it allowed you to do was there was a loophole with the way that you could manipulate the day and time that you would schedule lightning deals right. So what we did is we analyzed a year’s worth of sales data for all of our main ASINs that qualified for those lightning deals and we determined what the best day of the week in time range was, where they were getting the most traffic and the highest sales volumes. So then we built out internal SOPs to use that hack to schedule every lightning deal every week to fall on that specific day in that specific time window. And when we did that, man, I’m telling you like I was probably pushing through you know, 80 to 100 000 in sales and lightning deals a week with that hack it was like it made us a lot of money until Amazon pulled the plug on it.
Kevin King:
That’s awesome. That that’s why we do it. That’s why that’s why you should be in the Helium 10 Elite. If anybody’s listening, it’s h10.me forward slash elite if you want to check that out. But yeah, so what that is? Since 2017, every month, I bring on a couple of guests and we talk about different topics, hot things, tactics, whatever’s going on in the world of Amazon, and then at the end I do something called Seven Ninja Hacks. I’ve done, I think, going on almost. I was thinking the other day it’s nine years now I’ve been doing this thing. Moved on to other things.
Jerry:
We’ve moved on to other things, but I do subscribe to your newsletter and we pull a lot of stuff out of there. So I read that you know a couple of times a week. So we’re still connected in that way.
Kevin King:
Awesome, awesome. Yeah, the newsletter is BillionDollarSellers.com. For those of you that aren’t aware or listening, it’s every Monday and Thursday and I try to provide. What do you find different about that newsletter than some of the others that you might get?
Jerry:
I think it’s more actionable, right. Just, you know, things that we can actually implement into the business right now. It just gives us some insight. I really like a lot of the stuff that you’ve been talking about with AI in there, like we embrace it a ton. I was at a conference a couple of years ago at the Venetian in Las Vegas held by Perry Belcher, one of his AI summit type of—
Kevin King:
The AI bot summit.
Jerry:
Yep exactly, and it’s just opened my eyes you know to things. So I enjoy a lot of that stuff. You know in the newsletter that you do.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I was at that AI bot summit too.
Jerry:
Oh no kidding.
Kevin King:
Yeah, I was actually there. I was actually at that summit and that’s why I started the newsletter actually.
Jerry:
Oh no kidding.
Kevin King:
I’ve been doing newsletters before that. I’d done them back like 20 years ago, but I’d gotten away from it. Then he just kind of reminded me and he’s talking about using AI. It’s like no, I’m not so sure that AI is going to do a newsletter like he was showing. Uh, it’s like I didn’t, I didn’t subscribe to that at all and it’s proved I was right. It’s failed, uh, but uh, the fact of doing a newsletter is still one of the most powerful things I’ve probably ever done in my business, and I think every you guys people who are at, should have a newsletter. Everybody should have a newsletter, and it should not be about your company. The newsletter should actually be about your industry, and most people that have newsletters are just completely doing them wrong. That’s a whole another subject—
Jerry:
A whole another topic.
Kevin King:
A whole another topic. So you’ve been doing this for a while, like almost 17 years, or something like that.
Jerry:
Yeah, I started with e-commerce in 2008. So I come from a technology background. I was programming robotics and doing automation work for the big three outside of Detroit, Michigan, and when the whole financial meltdown happened, learning e-commerce was kind of necessity to survive, right. And I just found that, uh, I excelled at it, um, and you know, it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s history now, right. It’s like I’ve been doing it since 2008, with work with every major e-tailer out there. Um, starting off with places like CSN stores, which is Wayfair, with Niche Commerce, which is Hayneedle Jet Walmart, ATG stores, which is Lowe’s Home Depot, like all of those guys, I mean it was a dramatically different dynamic back then than it is today. And then I mean this is before Amazon was even a thing, right.
Kevin King:
What kind of products was that or what were you doing on that?
Jerry:
So I was doing IT work for a outdoor furniture and decor manufacturer at the time and I was running their exchange servers, data servers, all their IT infrastructure and the owner, you know, when the financial crisis happened, she was primarily selling to small mom and pop garden centers across the United States and overnight, because of all those businesses closing, she kind of, you know, lost half of her customer base. And I was kept on staff just because the IT infrastructure stuff and we were having a sales meeting about what we were going to do to keep the business going and I kind of raised my hand in the back just because I saw a lot of people talking about e-commerce back then and she just said, hey, go pursue it. And it exploded actually. Starting back then, I was able to do in the first year of working on it, which was 2009 when we were fully doing the deal, $2 million in wholesale. So back then I mean that’s a ton of money right, and that’s just kind of where my whole journey started.
Kevin King:
And what made you decide to get into the Amazon game?
Jerry:
So I had transitioned from working for that manufacturer to another one outside of Chicago that was doing lighting products and we were selling a ton on like Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowe’s, like that type of thing. And somehow Amazon got our contact information and a 1P account manager reached out to us and said Hey, do you want to sell, you know, as a vendor, the lighting products on Amazon? And that kind of started the whole deal and from there—
Kevin King:
What year was this about?
Jerry:
That was probably, that was probably 2014. Somewhere there like I remember going to the first Amazon vendor conference in Seattle in like 2015, when they handed out the first iteration of the Amazon fire sticks as a door prize for people who show up to the conference.
Kevin King:
Right yeah.
Jerry:
So, it’s been a minute. So, the journey started with Amazon asking us to be part of their vendor program. And then we opened up 3P and the whole thing kind of exploded from there, but the magic really didn’t start happening until probably 2017 or 2018 with the organization that I’m with now.
Kevin King:
So you worked for that company. Then you went out on your own and started selling your own stuff with a partner?
Jerry:
Yes, in between there, though, I was actually headhunted to build a brand. Have you ever heard of Seagate Technology?
Kevin King:
The hard drive guys?
Jerry:
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin King:
Yeah.
Jerry:
So I got headhunted by the founder of Seagate to work on a startup. It was cool. Inevitably it failed. And then I started with my business partner on the brands that we have now.
Kevin King:
And now you’re still selling today, right, you’re still doing seven, eight figures, a hefty amount today.
Jerry:
Yes, yeah, yeah. So, we have three brands that we do our flagship brand, which is a skincare brand. We scaled it out to a little over 7 million US and then combined with Canada, the EU countries and Shopify, it was just shy of 10 million. In fact, we were INC listed three years and one of those we were the fifth fastest growing company in the Midwest.
Kevin King:
You say, you say war, is that brand still?
Jerry:
Yeah, we still, yeah, we still have it.
Kevin King:
Yep, okay, okay, you’re talking in like a past tense. I was like oh, yeah, maybe. I thought maybe you sold it or something like that.
Jerry:
No, we still hope, we still have it. So I’m still, you know, Amazon seller right like every day.
Kevin King:
So, you have a big team working that, or is it just a few of you?
Jerry:
There. Well, we do run lean. We have had, you know, more team members than we do now just because we’ve incorporated a lot of technology, just for efficiency, you know, to trim some of that out.
Kevin King:
I know you’re with an engineering background. You know I hear this. I see this quite a bit. I think there’s a pattern. Someone should do a study on this that engineers that get into selling e-commerce tend to do better than a lot of them, and I think that may be because of the math and analytical skills. A lot of people get into Amazon. They think of it as a glamorous thing oh, I’m going to pick cool products to sell and create some pretty ads and pretty pictures and stuff like that versus the analytical people get into it and it’s all about the numbers and they don’t really care what they’re selling. They just want to know about the numbers and make it work. And I see that pattern. Do you think there’s any truth to that?
Jerry:
A hundred percent right. One of the core values of our organization is data drives our decisions, right? So, personally, like I don’t care what it is, right, you know. Like I do skincare, haircare products and some supplements right. Just because the numbers said that that was the biggest opportunities that you know that we had available right. Like I mean, I know nothing about skincare stuff, but I can sell it on Amazon. You know what I mean. So, I absolutely believe that and I do think that having a and funny thing is my business partner is you know engineering as well but I think that that gives us the ability to be problem solvers at heart as well right, which allows us to overcome a lot of the hurdles that separate people from success on Amazon and it allows us to look at things in a much larger picture for success.
Kevin King:
And I know, with your selling and with we’ll talk about your other company here in a second but you’re also like you said, you were at the AI Bot Summit two years ago, so that means you’re on the leading cutting edge. I mean, AI has been around 30 years, but it’s really taken off big in the last couple of years and it’s making leaps and bounds by the day, and I know you’re implementing that into your peak ROAS business as well as your Amazon business. Sure, where do you see this going with AI? I mean, I think there’s a lot of sellers that don’t quite have their head around this. They hear of Rufus, they hear of Cosmo, they hear of oh, I can use it to analyze my reviews and maybe help me do a little bit of a PPC analysis of my reports or something, but that’s just touching the surface. I mean, that’s nothing compared to where we’re going with it. Where do you see this going?
Jerry:
I see this basically creating levels of efficiencies and automated teams right, unlike anything that we’ve ever seen.
Kevin King:
Like agents? Talking about agents?
Jerry:
Yeah, exactly right. So, just for an example, we were talking about team members, right?
Kevin King:
Well, you said you cut them earlier because of technology. You’re able to because of technology.
Jerry:
Yeah. So one of the biggest things that that we do with AI right now is, uh, we have some pretty sophisticated, internally developed prompt stacks that we that we use where we analyze product right, we analyze an ASIN, so AI understands what it is okay, and then we tell it to put together all of the relevant industry knowledge that it understands about this and we use it to build out very specific ideal customer profiles, personas, based on what the product is and what it understands as far as the industry goes about people who are most likely going to need the product that we sell right. Then we incorporate in data out of, you know, advertising reports, search query performance reports, those type of things to craft a series of buyer decision questions right, that we then use to build out product copy, descriptions, the type of copy that we put into our infographics, and also use that to answer a lot of those Cosmo questions. To train for Rufus and you know, to sit down and do that manually, that would have taken, you know, like, like days to do. We can do it in an hour now and it spits out content that you wouldn’t believe. Like I can train these different agents to say, okay, it understands what this product type is. This is the copywriter who I want you to model off of, because it, you know, they have the best type of copy you know for this product type, right, so we can get like super specific. I mean, if you want, like, I can spit out copy that sounds like William Shatner wrote it. You know what I mean.
Jerry:
And like, AI allows us to do all of that and, in, you know, do things in minutes as opposed to things that would take days before, right, and we’re embracing it in that way. We’re using it for some of our, you know, campaign structure builds. You know the way that we segment keywords, you know, based on intent and all those type of things. And that’s just kind of scratching the surface where we’re starting to look at how we can incorporate a lot of the low code, no code stuff into the internal tools that we do to improve efficiency and repeatability. Where I could have a PPC account manager that has a support specialist under them, I can use AI for the support specialist. Now, right, and just to prove efficiency. That way it allows us to be sharper on pricing, it allows us to be quicker, more repeatable. So, yeah, we’re trying to incorporate AI into every aspect of the business and I think over the next you know year, you know two years that you know, the vast majority of thing is going to be able to be done by agents.
Kevin King:
I do too. I mean, I think it’s we’re just touching I mean, right now it’s still kind of a crude version with Make or N8N or, you know, Zapier or something like that but you can see where it’s going and you can see where these things are going to become autonomous. I mean, I liken it to the cars, the Waymo cars. You’re south of Phoenix there, so Phoenix has one of the big major cities for driverless cars—
Jerry:
Everywhere.
Kevin King:
As is San Jose and Austin. Now it’s like the third I think the third one in the group. And then Tesla is launching completely autonomous cars, I think later this month and here in June in Austin, where you’re actually going to be able to use your Tesla autonomously, your own Tesla and actually job out your Tesla. If it’s sitting in your garage, you actually be able to use it to actually do Uber rides while you’re sleeping, with no driver, and stuff like that. It’s going to be. It’s interesting, but I see we’re going to get to that point where those things are working on their own, basically without, without a human just a human at the top of the chain. I think that’s what’s going to happen in e-commerce too, from the sourcing to everything, and the people that aren’t adapting to that, I think, are going to be losing out.
Jerry:
Oh, those people are just gonna, they are just going to get overwhelmed. Is what’s going to happen, right? Like, um, I mean even with the stuff that we’re starting to see um, I mean, we develop our own tools, like internal tools for PPC management, like that type of stuff. I can literally, you know, go into some of the AI tools now and describe what I want and it’ll write out the code for me, right? And then I just get like a like my coding guy, just to kind of brush it up a little bit. But it gets it 95 percent of the way there, right, and it does that in 30 seconds as opposed to, you know, two days of coding. It’s getting scary how good this stuff is good this stuff is?
Kevin King:
Yeah, it is, it’s, it’s um, um. I’m actually just back. In May I took a trip Uh, I took a weekend trip and went away to the Caribbean and one of the goals of that was just to get a break and change the scenery and take a little vacation. But also I took a laptop and a big like 20 inch monitor and I just played with AI. Uh, just cause I want to get my head around, I just wanted to just devote like a weekend to just playing with some of the stuff, because I use it daily. But it’s changing so fast and there’s so much cool stuff that you can do to automate and to have an advantage over your competition. No matter what you’re doing, you don’t have to be an expert at it. You just got to be a step or two ahead of everybody else and just stay a step or two ahead and you’re good.
Jerry:
And that’s really what it is right. It’s understanding kind of where the puck is going, you know, and with how complicated everything is with Amazon these days, right, with how competitive things are and how all the fees are, any way that you can improve efficiency, which to me, is being a steward of your resource right, like your time and your money. Right, and if you can save in any way at this point with using technology, I fully embrace it. Right, it’s what’s gonna separate people from profitability or loss, you know. So very important stuff.
Kevin King:
I mean in the technology. You’re using it in your other company, peak ROAS, which is something you guys started about five years ago. I think you told me or maybe I read it somewhere, or you told me that you guys needed some help on your PPC. So you hired a couple agencies and even one of them, I think you said the owner got involved, which usually happens to me too. So people always ask me Kevin, what’s a? Who’s a good PPC agency, like I don’t know. It’s because usually the owner gets involved when it’s me, because they don’t want. They don’t want to F it up because it’s bad reputation If, because I have a platform and stuff, they want to make sure it’s right, exactly, work out. And you bounced around and you got frustrated and then you guys said, screw it, we know how to code this stuff. We’re building stuff internally for ourselves. Let’s just do it ourselves. Tell me that story.
Jerry:
So, when we were really, really scaling hard with our brands.
Kevin King:
When the lightning deals were crushing right? That’s when the lightning deals were crushing.
Jerry:
Yeah, not only lightning deals man, we were also doing Deal of the Days. I had a direct line into the deals team at Amazon. I’d run Deal of the Days and I’d sell $750,000 worth of product in a day. Those type of things.
Kevin King:
Awesome, that’s awesome.
Jerry:
Yeah. So one of these days I’ll tell you how we manipulated some of the Deal of the Day stuff which has been very interesting with your friend Michelle, by the way.
Kevin King:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Jerry:
I pulled her into that one. But so we were really scaling hard on that at that point and just as the complexity grew within the uh, within the advertising space, it was taking more and more of my time to manage all of it. So I was working in the business as opposed to working on the business, right? And we sat down and said to ourselves, if there was any one thing that we could possibly offload because it’s systematized, it would be the PPC stuff, right? So we I won’t you know, say you know any of the agencies, but we were with three or four of them over the course of a couple of years. Some of them, you know, did decently well and some of them, in one of them, just decimated things, right. So we work with agencies that started with an A all the way to the letter Q, right, and the one that started with Q decimated stuff.
Kevin King:
I think I know.
Jerry:
I’m sure anybody watching knows who that is.
Kevin King:
I know who that is.
Jerry:
Yeah, yeah. So, but the problem was none of them quite aligned with what our goals are or what our you know what, which is profit, right? We would always come into these conversations because alignment is very important to us as an organization, right? It’s not all about success, it’s about values and just how well we work together and things like that, and there always seemed to be some level of misalignment in goals. So our goal was always profitability, and a lot of the agencies that we work with, right like they get paid by driving revenue, they get paid by, you know, increasing spend, and that’s not always the answer to profitability. So there was always a little bit of misalignment in those ways, so it never quite worked out. And, on top of that, they just weren’t ever really able to completely replicate the levels of success that we were driving when we were doing it ourselves. So, yeah, no, it was a thing of getting frustrated and just finally saying forget this, we will take our processes, we will automate them and we’ll just do the deal ourselves.
Kevin King:
And so that’s how you started Peak ROAS, you started internally for yourself.
Jerry:
Yes.
Kevin King:
And then you started doing other clients or—
Jerry:
No. We started internal where we were running it, and then we were in a couple of different, various mastermind groups and just know people, peers that we’ve met over the years at conferences and again mastermind groups, and we ran it on a couple of our friends’ accounts and it did pretty well. And that’s when we were like, hey, light bulb moment, let’s do this legitimately, for real.
Kevin King:
So how big is that business now? How many clients are you guys managing now?
Jerry:
We are very, very selective with the clients that we take in just because of the amazing guarantee that we have so right now we’re in the 12 to 15 client range and because of our amazing guarantee, which is we will double your ROI on the investment in our agency within 90 days or you get your money back. So, we’re very selective with–
Kevin King:
You get all your ad money back too?
Jerry:
No just—
Kevin King:
Oh damn.
Jerry:
You got it absolutely. For you we’ll do that, yeah, but it really comes down to again. It comes down to alignment, right? So the clients that we work with, we need to feel reasonably confident that we can do that for them and that we’re aligned on goals. So we go through very, very detailed account audits to determine as to whether or not we’re a fit and they’re a fit for us as well.
Kevin King:
What do you think is the right way for an agency to charge? Should it be a percent of ad spend? Should it be a percent of ad spend once they hit over a certain level? Should it be a flat monthly fee? Should it be a combination? I mean, how do you align those goals properly, because everybody does it differently.
Jerry:
Everybody does do it differently. I was never 100% fan of based on spend or based on revenue or anything like that. Because I’ll tell you what if you give me a bunch of money, I can spend a bunch of money in Amazon and sell you a bunch of stuff. That doesn’t mean that it’s profitable. We tried some of the performance-based stuff and, honestly, like we never really kind of, we never saw any type of improvements, even when we would try offering a couple of these agencies. You know even better, you know performance bonuses. So, we just kind of settled on the idea that we are going to structure our fees around the current revenue model or the current revenue that the client is doing, and just charge a flat fee for it. It just makes it a little bit easier, a little bit more predictable and a little bit easier to swallow on some of this stuff for people.
Kevin King:
Well, some people would argue with you take on a client. They’re doing a million bucks and because of you, of your strategies, you grow them to 5 million bucks. If you’re just charging them $3,500 a month or five grand a month, or whatever it may be, you’re not sharing in and that’s that what you’ve helped them do. So that’s where a lot of people have a. They argue with themselves like which way should it be? Should I, if I helped them? Shouldn’t I get a little piece of that? Or should you just be? That’s what you’re hired for, this is your fee, and make it there.
Jerry:
There’s part of that. I mean, we have an ideal customer profile you know, like, obviously, that we’re trying to work with, and if a client kind of falls below that, we may work out some type of percentage as well as a flat fee. But we try to stick a flat fee if we can.
Kevin King:
So agency, you hear this story. I mean you said you bounced around three or four different agencies in a couple of years. I think that’s a pretty common thing. So, a lot of people listening here probably tried either considering they’re considering using an agency or they’ve been bouncing around between agencies. I think the life cycle is like three or four months at the average agency because they all over-promise and under-deliver, not all, but most of them over-promise and under-deliver and I think I have a list. There’s a guy that monitors the agency business in Amazon and there’s like 869 or 870, something like that on his active list that are actually doing have several clients and I think there’s like 3000 something total when you count. You know Pakistani VAs that are hanging on shingles saying they’re an agency or whatever that industry, and I’ve talked to a couple of other people who have them on the podcast. They say it’s just a race to the bottom. It’s just that everybody’s just looking for the cheapest price and you know the big sellers that understand it are a little different, but the bulk and the volume is coming from people that aren’t as sophisticated and it’s just a race and it’s hard to differentiate. Is that why you guys are so selective and you’re like, okay, we just want our 12 to 15 and you have to. We pick you, you don’t pick us kind of thing.
Jerry:
That’s part of the mentality for it for sure, right, and what differentiates is we look at things a little bit different than your typical agency, right? Like we are sellers’ man, like I am a through and through Amazon seller, right so—
Kevin King:
And you’re still selling?
Jerry:
Yeah, I’m still selling.
Kevin King:
You weren’t one of these guys that was sold in 2017 and started an agency. You haven’t been in Seller Central—
Jerry:
No.
Kevin King:
In eight years. You’re not one of those. You’re like actively in there, right now?
Jerry:
Actively in it, like right now.
Kevin King:
And you’re being affected just like everybody else. You’re getting affected by tariffs and fee changes and everything, so you understand the pain.
Jerry:
Oh, absolutely like I was just, you know like we’re trying to figure out, like what we’re doing as far as these tariffs go right now, half of my product assortment is made in the US. The other half isn’t right and so, no, we deal with that stuff on a daily basis, just like, you know, anybody else. So ,it’s, I’m a peer, right? So? And then we look at things from the perspective of profit. Right, a lot of people are chasing vanity metrics, you know, like ACOS and revenue and TACOS and all that type of stuff. We really look at it from the perspective of what can we do to maximize profitability on an ASIN to ASIN basis? And that’s the systems that we built within our brands to scale things. Those were questions that we always asked the agencies that we ended up partnering with. What can you guys do for us to help us to get each ASIN to the point of diminishing return right, where, no matter how much more we put into it, right, like profit is, you know, not going up. Right, like it’s like what can we do to drive to those type of points? Can you get there? You know, no, probably not.
Jerry:
But we work in, our systems are designed to push and pull the different levers within Amazon to be able to drive the maximum level of profitability, whether it is, you know, conversion optimization, with the way that the detail pages you know present to people, or how we are optimizing pricing or promotional offerings, inventory management, brand protection, reviews, refining product to fix problems, of course, advertising, those type of things and we really look at all of it as a complete ecosystem where, you know, think about it like a combination lock, you’re off by one number and the whole thing doesn’t work the right way, right? So we have built strategies, you know, within our brands as sellers that we actively use today, and we take those strategies, tactics, tools and bring them into our partner brand businesses as well, focusing specifically on the end of day profit, because that’s what pays the bills man, like a lot of revenue or super low ACOS that don’t pay the bills.
Kevin King:
So, you’re looking at it more holistically versus a lot of agencies. All they care about is the advertising side of things.
Jerry:
Correct.
Kevin King:
They’re not focusing on how does this everything fit into this big picture.
Jerry:
Correct.
Kevin King:
Now are you just doing when it comes to the advertising side? Are you just doing on Amazon stuff, or are you helping people off Amazon as well?
Jerry:
We do some stuff within Shopify too, especially with building out, you know, like Klaviyo stuff. You know working through some of the different, various plugins that you can put into Klaviyo for upsells and downsells or, excuse me, into Shopify and that type of stuff. We really don’t dabble too much in Walmart. I do a little bit of that for myself, but I guess if somebody wanted an eye on it, like from advertising perspective, I’d take a look at it.
Kevin King:
Any social media stuff, TikTok or Meta or anything like that.
Jerry:
No, we’re not offering that.
Kevin King:
So what do you see? The AI? How’s the AI affecting the PPC stuff? I mean, we talked about it on the product side, but how are you guys utilizing it to really get an edge when it comes to the PPC side stuff?
Jerry:
Right now, we’re using it to analyze reports and then we’re using it to build and people will say one thing, people will say another thing. We’re using it to build out intent groups to help us to do that. With the way that we’re grouping keywords and the search terms and whatnot within advertising. We still do have a lot of the human presence, but the biggest thing that we’re doing with AI right now is using it to write a lot of the code that we do for the automation and tools that we use for managing the accounts.
Kevin King:
What do you see? I mean you talked about you do some stuff in Shopify. Open AI about a month ago announced a partnership with Shopify for product search and stuff, and you’re seeing more of these AI engines. Perplexity has been doing it for a while, seeing more of them start to integrate that, and then now you have Cosmo and Rufus, like you just said, using the AI to optimize for intent-based. Where do you see search going? The old way is game the system with keywords, and now the new way is you got to figure out the avatar and the intent and right now you got to kind of ride that line between both of them. But where do you see this going?
Jerry:
I see it getting to the place where and you kind of already see some of it right now. Like, at least I think where I think Amazon is just building like massive, massive customer profiles of every single person that uses the platform. It’s using AI to understand what their shopping behaviors are, the way that they search, and it is going to use a lot of the intent information that is in those listings to put products that it deems as having the highest likelihood of conversion in front of people. So, a lot of the stuff that we’re doing too now is we are looking for very specific search terms that we’re pulling out of search term reports and whatnot, and we’re literally incorporating those search terms into images. We’re answering buyer decision questions like really like within an image, because I think that AI is going to be scanning all of that stuff for different signals and cues for what the product is, so it can put what it thinks is the optimal product in front of that shopper when they’re ready to buy. So I mean, I think that I think that it’s getting to the place where it’s not just going to be keywords in any way, it’s going to be the entire way the listing is created from images all the way down to the copy, to what you have in the back end.
Kevin King:
Do you think there’s going to be a formula to that or you think it’s going to be throwing darts against the wall trying to figure this out, because people have figured reverse engineering. Nobody really knows how the A9 works, but we have a pretty good idea. I just by reverse engineering and enough experience, enough heads beating on it and the last leaks coming out here or there from China or India or wherever. But how do you think? What do you think the new method’s going to be for ranking and selling online if it’s not keywords anymore?
Jerry:
No.
Kevin King:
It won’t be keywords anymore. It’s going to be this intent-based stuff. Do you think there’s going to be? Do you think people are going to be sophisticated enough to actually know how to give the AI what it wants so that you actually show up? Or is it always going to be constantly changing as the AI just evolves?
Jerry:
I think that there will be constant change, right when you know, just like with anything else, the way that we incorporated keywords and the way that we had all the back-end data, like that stuff has changed, you know, over the years.
Kevin King:
We have reports of this keyword shows up here this many times, this many conversions, all that stuff, but we don’t know, like you just said, Amazon’s creating this massive database. They’ve been doing it for years but they know everything I’ve ever done. I mean you can actually request from Amazon your dossier as a buyer and mine was when I did it about two years ago with 750 page PDF and it had every single thing I’ve ever done in the Amazon ecosystem, not just buying products. Anything I’ve ever put to my cart took it out. Anything I’ve ever looked at how long I stayed on places. Anything I’ve ever watched on Amazon Prime how many times I paused it where I paused it. Anything I’ve ever done on Kindle every little, every single thing, is in that, in that file, and they have access to that. We don’t Versus. We can’t really scrape that. So our thing is that we have to use the tools like what you’re doing where you said you’re creating these avatars and this intent based stuff and these profiles of people, and so I think it’s going to become more of a branding profile marketing than it is a keyword hacking marketing.
Jerry:
Yeah, the way that I kind of like to describe it to people when we talk about it. Think of the company Jeep, for example. Who’s selling a Jeep Liberty, right, that car itself is sellable to two different avatars, right? You have, like the soccer mom, okay, who’s looking for reliability, who’s looking for safety, who’s looking for seating capacity, those type of things, that’s what’s important to her. And then you have the guy who wants to take the thing off-roading, who wants to know about the torque and the ruggedness, all that type of stuff. So, you’re selling the exact same product to those exact same, you know, those two different, completely different avatars. So, I think a lot this is and that’s why we structure a lot of the campaigns, you know, with intent-based keyword grouping. So we just it’s a little bit easier to understand where a lot of the traffic is coming from, where a lot of the conversions and stuff like that are coming from, because when we sit down and use AI to build out our listings, we typically end up with three or four different avatars that we’re selling to, right, and we’re using that data that we pull the you know, out of Amazon from the search term reports and other advertising reports, conversion rates and business reports.
Jerry:
You know what we’re getting out of search query reports and things like that to understand what resonates the most with people and doubling down on that stuff right, and we can see almost in real time with advertising data that this search term is driving all of this. Let’s talk about that more, right, and let’s start incorporating that into the images. Let’s incorporate that more into the way that we depict the product and tell the story, and I think that AI is just going to get better and better and better in understanding all of that, understanding how a particular individual customer shops and using what it has learned about the product to try to solve what it thinks is the problem that the individual shopper is having. I mean, I think that the entire search game is going to be changing over the next couple of years to complete intent-based you.
Kevin King:
know Well, right now, if you take that example, you have four or five different reason or avatars or people, like the Jeep example, even the two. Take the Jeep, the two avatars. Right now you’re having to combine those into one listing on Amazon, so your images are like okay, here’s the guy that, the soccer mom that wants to carry the net and the soccer ball and all the stuff in the back and take her kids to the game, and then the guy who wants to go off-roading in the desert. That’s all in the same listing. That may actually confuse the AI. Which one is it, or is it for both, or whatever? Or if the AI figures it out, which it probably can when the customer comes there he’s like wait a second, I don’t want something for soccer moms, I want something for off roading. I see there’s an off roading picture of his awesome site now. So what I see is you’re gonna have to have separate listings for the same product, separate SKUs, and a good example of this I just had someone on the. I do another podcast called Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar, and it’s not about Amazon, it’s about marketing. And we recently had a lady on the episode that had invented a light, for she was an aesthetician and doing eyelashes and all the lights that they were using in the studios were not bright enough or they cast a shadow or the stand. It’s easy to knock it over and knock it into the client. So she developed a special arc shaped light that just lights up the whole face so they can see all these little fine hairs and all this kind of stuff. And she went to, she developed it and put it out and it’s crushing right now.
Kevin King:
But once she she came out she realized, oh wait, there’s other markets that actually want this. Tattoo artist need this, uh, and there’s, um, there’s, you know, other people doing, uh, facials and other types of things need this light too. So they tried to do one combined like website and go after the. It didn’t work and the ads didn’t work. So then when that what they did is they split the websites up into one. It’s the exact same product, exact same packaging, everything, but one website’s all for tattoo artists, one’s all for eyelash people, one’s all for facial people and so on. She’s got like 10 different use cases for it that she didn’t realize in the beginning and each website speaks to them and speaks to them only, and sales went up like 10x. So do you see where we’re going to have to do something like that on Amazon?
Jerry:
Absolutely, but I almost see it to the place where, like to me and I was talking with this about you know so many about a month ago it would be great if Amazon gave the ability right where you could put multiple versions of back-end data in there and Amazon displays—
Kevin King:
Let them just choose who they, which one they know.
Jerry:
Right, exactly right. So it it’d be like, um, like it knows, like we’re both shopping for you know, like whatever right, and it says okay, Jerry, this. We think this version of this, this detail page, is best suited for you. Kevin, we think that this detail page is best suited for you. It’s the exact same product. So I mean, I wish Amazon was a little bit better at that. We do exactly what your lighting friend said with Shopify, right, where we build out our Meta advertising funnels and landing pages. Exactly the same thing where we speak to you know a specific avatar, uh, um, you know, through the entire funnel, um, and I wish Amazon would adopt a little bit more of that type of thing because, you’re right, man products definitely, um, can be multi-category and appeal to different people in different ways, and right now it is very hard to do that stuff. We do a lot of AB-B testing with that to kind of see which versions of what resonate the best and then obviously go for the one that has the highest sales volumes, but I would absolutely like the ability to appeal to both of them on separate listings, without having to create multiple ASINs and send in different amounts of inventory to both, just because that’s a cash flow crunch.
Kevin King:
One of the other things that she did that’s interesting is she wasn’t on Amazon really. Originally she was direct consumer from her Shopify site. Then she got on Amazon and sales started taking off. And this is a $500 light, so it’s an expensive light, but sales are taking off. And then all the Chinese started knocking her off and so she’s. She’s fighting this, this IP battle against someone. She’s spending quite a bit of money and but it’s like whack-a-mole. She’ll get them off and another one will pop up. But they’re selling a similar light for $69 or something. But that light, uh, which what she finds is a lot of times the people were buying that light. It just wasn’t the same quality. They’d buy that and they they’d go oh, I shouldn’t have done this, I should have bought the real thing. So what she did? She knocked herself off. She actually said, well, if they’re going to do this, I’ll just knock myself off and I’ll actually come out with a $79 light and it won’t be as solid as steel, it won’t be as heavy, it won’t be this or whatever, and what she would find is a lot of people would end up buying that and then going oh, this is pretty good, but now I want the real thing, and they would upgrade to the real thing. So, I think right now, the only way to do this is like what you said is you’d have to have multiple ASINs and multiple things to actually target it. It might get to where that’s the stopgap, until Amazon allows us to actually create multiple backends, which that’s actually a good idea. They should actually be looking at that.
Jerry:
Yeah, no, like I mean, we were at oh geez, what con. It was a conference probably. Maybe it was like Seller con or something like that in 2019. And we were, uh, talking about trying to develop that into our skincare website where, when a customer like the like, they would put in some data, right, we would know,
Kevin King:
Answer a couple of questions or something.
Jerry:
Answer some questions and then it would tailor the website experience with the images you know to match their demographic you know, just to just to do those type of things. So I mean, Amazon obviously has demographic data. You can pull all that in there now, right. So I don’t know why they don’t leverage some of that. I mean, there are definitely some things that Amazon should adopt from some of these different platforms, right, like that they should make some of the I mean, they’re doing some better stuff with subscribe and save now, but that monthly reoccurring revenue stuff they need to. Really, you know turn that up a whole bunch. So I mean we can only hope you know.
Kevin King:
What are you doing to get built to control your own destiny, I mean, versus just depending on Amazon and the marketplace where you don’t get the customer data. There’s ways to try to get that off with package inserts and stuff. You get it on Shopify. But what are you doing to like future-proof yourself with owning your customers or having that data internally, not just being relying on others?
Jerry:
Yeah, we’ve been using. So that’s the thing, right, a lot of people tend to look at Amazon as a revenue channel right. We look at it as a revenue channel and a customer acquisition channel, for sure. So all of the product that we sell, or at least our high-volume product, we do include very, very decent offers for, you know, scanning QR codes and getting people out of Amazon, right where I will give people like a free product you know, 100% free here you go just to get in there. And we’ve had we’ve been doing that probably for the last I don’t know you know, five, six years and have built a massive list of customers driven all out of Amazon. Do you get them all? No, but if you’re selling 100,000 products a month and you get a 10% opt-in rate, that adds up very quickly. So it’s all about how you create that product insert and the offer that you have on there to get people to take action. And we spent a lot of time testing stuff out where I worked with my factory and I tried, you know, 20 iterations of product inserts and, you know, would do small batches and build out individual Klaviyo flows for each one to understand which ones had the highest opt-in rates right. To figure out, like the exact language, the exact design, the colors, what offer we had to give people to do that. So we’ve taken a lot of time in doing that and I think that that is one of the most important things that we have done to leverage that Amazon customer base and start to make it our own.
Kevin King:
So what do you do with that? A lot of people they do these package inserts and they get the emails or the addresses and they don’t do anything with them. They’re afraid to email them, they’re afraid to send them anything. What do you guys do to market to them or engage on and use that?
Jerry:
So we typically start out with value-added content, honestly, just to kind of build a little bit of that rapport. So the initial couple of emails are value-added content, thanking them for being a part of the brand, right, like here is the best way to use the product, here’s a routine like that type of thing and we may include some soft sales in there. But then they get put through very specific Klaviyo flows for upsells, cross-sells, all that type of thing, and as people progress through there, if they make a purchase, it puts them into the next flow where it kind of restarts. That again. And like on our skincare brand, for example, all of it is designed to work together, right like every piece in it is designed to complement one another. So, we just have a massive web of flows that gives them value-added content and just takes them through different sequences of buying different products to complete their entire skincare routines.
Kevin King:
Is the value-added content just in relation to your products or do you add value-added content in relation to their avatar or pain points?
Jerry:
Both right, so it’s a series. So, like what we did is on the skincare brand, we worked with licensed medical professionals to build up the brand right, and one of the things that we did that I thought was cool is we sat down with a licensed medical and aesthetician and built out the entire routine specifically around the pain points that the majority of the clients that would come into the spa would want solved, and we speak a lot about that stuff, so we’re actually solving problems for people who are coming into our brand to solve a specific issue.
Kevin King:
Do you have a newsletter or is it just marketing emails?
Jerry:
Just marketing emails.
Kevin King:
Have you ever considered have a newsletter?
Jerry:
We have. It’s just been a resource thing. But with AI, though, we can start to do that. But we’ve just been growing out things in other areas, especially with the agency. But these are the type of things where we’re starting to incorporate these type of offerings. I met some people at Prosper where we’ve been talking about you know, customer acquisition. You know, from Amazon into Shopify, the ways that we have done it and we’re starting to help some people do that as well.
Kevin King:
What’s this? I see behind you there’s a couple little skinny little things. Those of you watching here on the YouTube, you can see this. Those of you listening, you can’t see it. But right behind him there’s two little pointy head skinny little things sitting there with some wings on the bottom. What are those things back there? Are those tequila bottles?
Jerry:
Yeah, they’re tequila bottles actually. No, those are rockets. So it’s a funny thing. My beautiful wife Stacy, you know, chuckles and rolls her eyes every time I say it, but it is absolutely true. In my spare time when I’m not, you know, selling things online or helping people sell things online I design, build and launch large, high-power rockets. In fact, I have the highest certification level available in the United States to do that. So I’m a rocket scientist in my spare time.
Kevin King:
So when you say build, are these kits? Or you’re out there with the tools in the garage welding round tubes together and stuff.
Jerry:
Correct yes, it’s nothing that you’re buying in the hobby store. I’ll say that. So I use software and a lot of math to build these things cutting pieces using laser cutters and CNC machines and all that type of stuff to put these together, building electronics packages for safe deployment of parachutes and barometric pressure sensing altimeters and all that type of stuff. Yeah, it’s not SpaceX, but it’s as close as you can get as an amateur.
Kevin King:
How high can these things go?
Jerry:
Miles. Like those ones behind me. Those might be, you know, I don’t know, 1200 feet, 1500 feet, but I’ve, I’ve launched, you know, rockets three or four miles, three or four miles up.
Kevin King:
Do you put a camera on them to like?
Jerry:
Yes, yeah, I’ve done that. Yeah, We’ve done cameras. But depending on where you are in the country and how they regulate, the airspace kind of dictates how high you can go. When I was living in Chicago, 16,000 feet just because of O’Hare airport. But now that I’m out here in Phoenix, we have some launch ranges out here which are 48,000 feet In Nevada. As long as you get the proper permits from the government, there is no limit.
Kevin King:
So that’s about nine miles. 48,000 feet is about nine miles.
Jerry:
Yeah, it’s up there.
Kevin King:
Yeah. So you haven’t gotten one to you haven’t gotten one. Where is it? Gravity is at 200. Was it 270 miles? Where is weightlessness?
Jerry:
The Von Karman line, I think it’s 80 miles or 90 miles.
Kevin King:
I thought it was 79. I couldn’t remember. Yeah, okay.
Jerry:
Yeah, no, like something like a launch like that, like I got, I got some money, but I don’t got that kind of money.
Kevin King:
You need some, some powerful rockets on the bottom of that thing.
Jerry:
Yeah, you do, and just with, just like with everything else right, the costs of things have increased so much over the last couple of years you would literally need funding as a single individual to do something like that, just because that gets expensive so–
Kevin King:
You ever have them like just go up like 50 feet and then turn right back around and plant themselves in the dirt, 100%.
Jerry:
So I’ve had them explode, I’ve got all kinds of stuff, but it’s a pretty complicated certification process that I went through to be able to do this. The government does let me have, or the regulating bodies do allow me to have, propellant and stuff like that, and it’s the exact same, essentially the exact same stuff that the solid rocket boosters in the space shuttle would use. So it’s ammonium perchlorate based. And I mean it’s highly regulated, it is, at the end of the day, it’s safe. It’s just one of those like loud, fast, fun things that I like to do and I like the design side of it. I enjoy building them and um and all of that. So it just speaks to the engineering stuff.
Kevin King:
So they’re reusable then? You’re like space like you—
Jerry:
Yeah, yeah.
Kevin King:
With a parachute yeah, they’re reusable?
Jerry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don’t want, you know, like a three thousand dollar rocket, you know, crashing at 800 miles an hour into the ground, because then you know it’s a little bit of a waste.
Kevin King:
You have to go out outside. I mean, you’re in Arizona there, so there’s lots of open space. You have to go out like a rocket launch area or you just find a place out next to a Breaking Bad’s trailer.
Jerry:
I wish it was that easy. No, you have to work with the FAA and designate specific areas for launching. You have to coordinate with them to get flight waivers where they literally reroute air traffic around your flight areas and things like that. So, it’s not a case of just going out in the middle of the desert and doing stuff. They will pick that up on radar, right. Not to say that they’re going to show up and arrest you or anything like that, but to do it legally and do it the right way. You’ve got to coordinate with the governing bodies to designate an area and then work with the FAA for your launch day, launch time, just to make sure that they route the air traffic around your area the right way.
Kevin King:
Yeah, that would kind of suck if the plane coming out of Sky Harbor came in contact with a rocket shooting up. That would not be.
Jerry:
I was living in Chicago. Chicago O’Hare was always complicated, but there is a small airport in South Bend, right, and we would, we would notify them that we were doing stuff and it would literally draw the pilots. You know, small like little prop planes, they’d get curious and it’s like, dude, you’re at like 5,000 feet right now. I can literally like knock you down, don’t do that. You know it’s serious. I mean, some of these rockets weigh, you know, 30, 40, 50 pounds, are made from reinforced fiberglass, going 800 miles an hour. So it would definitely cause an issue if something like that would happen.
Kevin King:
So when you’re driving onto the launch pad, is that fuel and stuff that’s sitting in the back of your truck or your Jeep or whatever you have? Is that dangerous? If someone rammed into you, would that be an explosion?
Jerry:
No, it doesn’t quite work that way. It does require igniters, but if you just took it and if you just well, if it’s inside the motor case and you lit it off, absolutely it’s dangerous, right, but it’s, it’s impact resistant, it won’t go off by impact. And if you took the propellant and just outside of a motor case and tossed it into a fire pit, it would kind of resemble that super bright light from a sparkler, but times like a million. It’s really not super energetic, unless it’s built into the final motor that you would use to launch the rocket.
Kevin King:
Cool. Well, that’s a cool hobby. That’s a different one. That’s actually really cool. Now you got me thinking like what can I do that’s really cool? I need a cool hobby. I need to go build something.
Jerry:
Yeah for sure.
Kevin King:
Well, jerry, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing today. If people want to find out more about you or your company, what’s the best way to do that?
Jerry:
They can just go on to the peakroaz.ai website and there is an account audit button in there, or they can just reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Well, thanks for joining today. It’s been great.
Jerry:
Kevin, man anytime and again, thanks for all you do and I look forward to talking with you again.
Kevin King:
Hopefully you’ve been listening to the AM/PM podcast or, if you’re new to this, you go back and you listen to some of the previous episodes because, as you can see from this week’s episode with a rocket scientist, every episode of the AM/PM podcast can help propel you to higher and higher limits of the sky when it comes to selling on Amazon and in e-commerce. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Jerry. We’ll be back again next week with another awesome episode. Don’t forget you can subscribe to my newsletter that we talked about BillionDollarSellers.com and coming up in August. I’ve got a virtual another Billion Dollar Seller Summit virtual event happening August 19th to the 21st. And if you want to get insider tips every single month, just like Jerry did, where he said it helped him make millions of dollars, you can join the Helium 10 Elite that’s at h10.me/elite. Get all the information there. H10.me/elite. See you again next week.
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