397: Forget Research Tools! How Jason Found Profitable Products To Sell By Helping His Child

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now this is the final week of student month where I’ve been bringing in successful students from my course to talk about their businesses. And by the way, let me know if you’ve been enjoying this series by sending me an email at steve at mywifequitterjob.com. If I get enough interest, I might do this again, but I would love your honest feedback. Now today I have Jason Shea on the show and Jason runs Locky Kid.

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where he sells sensory toys for kids. And what I love about his story is that he started his business for his kids and he is quite possibly one of the most passionate students I’ve ever had regarding his niche. Enjoy his story. But before I begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Always excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depends on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider.

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Well, Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores, and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every single email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife.

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That’s KLABIYO.com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I focus a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without Postscript, which is my text message provider. Now why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce and e-commerce is their primary focus.

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Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcasts, which I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce,

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the Profitable Audience Podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m really happy to have Jason Shea on the show. Now, Jason is a student in my Creative Profitable Online Store course, and he runs a six-figure e-commerce store, soon to be seven figures, selling sensory tools for the home and classroom over at LockyKid.com. Now, Jason’s story is extremely compelling because he started his business after his son Keanu was diagnosed with autism and ADHD at a young age. And after struggling to find affordable quality products for his son,

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he decided to create his own brand instead. And what’s even cooler is that he has created an amazing community where families can help each other and share their journey on the LockieKid parent support group. And what I admire about Jason is that he’s not only just out there selling products for profit, he is running his business with a purpose. And with that, welcome to show, Jason, how are you doing today?

03:33
I’m doing great. was honor for me to be on your podcast. I’ve been listening to your podcast for many, many years. And thank you for all the incredible information that you share with the e-commerce community. I’m so happy to have you. And hopefully I did not butcher your story in the intro, but please tell the audience about your store, what you sell and how you got started. Yes. So 2000, this is going to be a little bit of long story, but I’m trying to make it short.

03:59
Okay. 13, uh, me and my wife used to live in Japan. I’m from Taiwan. My wife is from Japan, but I do speak Mandarin and Japanese as well. And, however, Japan, just like any of the Asian countries, that’s a huge taboo and a huge stigma around disabilities. When we first find out our son was down as autism and ADHD, we couldn’t find help. There’s no support. There’s no.

04:28
There’s no parents support group in Japan. There’s no resources to give you a perfect example. We live in Tokyo, one of the largest metropolitan area in this world with 14 million people. We can only find two therapy center to take our son to. Yeah, that’s crazy. I know just an Asian cultures. It doesn’t exist. Or if it is, you just kind of keep it under wraps and no one talks about it. A hundred percent. That’s exactly what happened to us. And you know, because

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What make it worse is autism ADHD is an invisible disabilities, which means it’s a lot easier to hide. You couldn’t hire kids on wheelchair, but you can hire kids with ADHD. problem. I can, can actually completely understand what you’re talking about. mean, anything that’s not visible, like mental health issues are generally taboo among Asian cultures. Yes. Yes. That’s unfortunate, but you know what? I’m going to change that. That’s my callings and that’s my passion.

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And I’m going to use my business over the next 10 years to change 1 million lives. 1 million lives of those families just like mine that are being affected by learning disabilities. And I want to change that to my business, to my teams. I want the university to use me as a vehicle for positive change. That’s very admirable. Why physical products of all the things that you could have done? So let me kind of complete the story there. So 2013, we got the analysis. We couldn’t find help in Japan.

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Fortunately, I have dual citizenship. have Taiwanese citizenship and US citizenship. I actually went to high school and college in California. So we decided to move back to US because US have the best resources for kids with special needs. Of course, US is not perfect. There’s still a lot of things that we need to do here in US to make it even better. But compared to Asian countries, it’s a lot better.

06:20
And then I started to connect with parents, therapists, and even teachers in the special education space. This is what I find out. I find out there’s a gap. It’s hard to find affordable, high quality sensory product created by someone also used the Dane product. So interesting. Who are the ones creating them then? A lot of the people, if you just Google them, Google any of my competition, you look up their CEO is a random single guy. It’s not even married. And of course this guy doesn’t have any kids.

06:51
Okay. So you already know they are in it for the money. I’m in it for a passion. mean, this is why I always openly share about everything I do in the business because guess what? You can copy my entire strategy. You can copy every single product I ever launched, but you can never copy my passion. And you can’t copy your community that you’ve developed either. Exactly. So I’m not afraid of people trying to compete with me because you can’t. There’s no way you can compete with me, unfortunately.

07:20
So, I mean, you saw a need for yourself for these sensory products, but how did you know that they were going to sell? Like, how did you go about validating what you wanted to sell before you began? This is something very unique. think a lot of the e-commerce seller doesn’t do enough is to talk to the customer. I, this is, I always advocate when I talk to, was follow e-commerce entrepreneur. Talk to your customer over the phone. This is what I do on a weekly basis. I talk to my customer over the phone for like 30 minutes.

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just trying to understand what kind of struggle they have, what kind of product they have tried, what do they like, what do they don’t like, and you get so much product idea. You don’t need to use jungle scout. You don’t need to use healing pen. That’s all BS because every single person is looking at the same data that you’re looking at. One of my mantra is if you follow the herd, you get slaughtered. I absolutely agree. So I have somewhat of a different philosophy. So I feel like you can either go broad,

08:18
and just do marketing really well, or you can go extremely niche in an area that no one else is really at and just dominate that market. Anywhere in between is much more difficult. So this is also going back to, depends on which direction you want to go, right? You want to go like a Walmart or you want to go as a niche store. Okay. So what was your first product then based on your research?

08:43
My first product is actually very simple product is a fidget chair band that is really just a giant rubber band that you put in front of the classroom chair, but it’s great for kids with ADHD and sensory issues. And it’s a very popular product used by the teachers. And we just redesigned it a little bit using a better material. And ours is only lettuce free, a chair band in the market. Latex free late latex free. I know that you saw an Amazon.

09:13
like a good portion of your business. How do you make your brand stand out? I just kind of cursory checked these products and they’re super competitive. Yes, it is. It is. So unfortunately, when I first started, I didn’t have the bandwidth and the design power to do something totally unique. So I would say a lot of the initial product when I first launched is almost like a me too product was minor modification, but all the new product I’m launching this year is so unique that no one have something even closely similar to ours.

09:44
Okay. So what was your process for that first product? Did you just, actually you speak the language. So did you actually go to Asia to get the product? No, I don’t need to go to Asia. just, on WeChat, I just talked to them over the phone using Chinese. And of course you don’t need to speak Chinese to talk to the supplier. Correct. But you help. Okay. And these suppliers, did you find them on Alibaba or? Yes, Alibaba. That’s how I started. Yeah. I think I purchased one of those e-commerce course. I forgot which one I purchased many, many years ago when I started back in 2016.

10:14
Okay, I mean, we were just talking about Jungle Scout and these rubber bands and stuff. And it was a Mewtwo product like you just said. So how did you get sales on this product? Back then, I don’t have an email list. I was a typical Amazon seller. I buy review. Okay, so this is back before they were cracking down. That’s 2016. mean, 17. That’s the wild west of Amazon. You can do any kind of crazy strategy and Amazon allow it.

10:42
But of course now you cannot do it and I don’t do it anymore. right. Well, let’s talk about your newest products that you’re designing from scratch. How are you getting those designed and manufactured? So right now, most of our product, have four manufacturers we use in China because of the relationship we built over the year. One of the latest product we are designing, my wife helped with the design. It’s a weighted lab animal we’ll be launching next month.

11:12
Knock on wood, hopefully we don’t have any delay with the container, but we’ll be launching this product next month. You know what’s funny is the last time we had talked on the phone, you mentioned that you and your wife don’t typically work together because you want to keep everything separate, right? But it seems like just now you told me that she’s, she’s actually working in on the business now. That’s a part-time consultant. I would say on a very, very part-time basis. Okay. Okay.

11:39
Yeah, so he’s not, she’s not in the daily meeting, the weekly meeting I’m in, but when I, but she is a much better designer than me as far as creative idea for products. She’s so much better than I am. I’m the worst. cannot, I can barely draw a monkey. cannot. Yeah. I’m not, I’m not a graphic designer and the idea person and the visionary of the business, but I’m not a designer. Right. Okay.

12:07
Just be careful there because I work with my wife and it’s not always smooth. So, okay. So, okay. So this product that’s launching, uh, actually I wanted to just back up a little bit. most of your sales on Amazon or your own store or partners? 2021 80 % of our entire revenue. And we did a little bit over 600,000 last year. Just to be transparent. 80 % of that is Amazon. 20 % is from ClickFunnels and Shopify.

12:36
Okay. And I know we had talked earlier when COVID hit your business got hit, right? Oh yeah. So 2020 is the darkest point in my entire e-commerce journey and maybe the darkest point of my life. I was on the edge of a bankruptcy and a divorce because most of my customers are school and most of the school buy our product. And we all know what happened to all the school in 2020. Every single school got shut down at the same time.

13:06
Yes. business pretty much got shut down alongside with the school in 2020. And right now, looking back, I’m actually grateful for what that actually happened because it forced me to reset. It forced me to relook at my business. And since then, I was able to come back even, even stronger. Like I shared with you earlier, before we go live here is my favorite animal is a Phoenix. And I’m also moving to Phoenix, Arizona in July this year.

13:35
Because that was me. was my entire business got burned into ashes in 2020. But guess what I was able to come back in 2021 and did 600,000 and this year and I’m attracted to 1.2 million was my brand. we talk about what happened? So so the school shut down, no one was buying your products on Amazon. How did you recover from that? I lay every single team member off. I did as I unsubscribe so my subscription pretty much

14:04
I try to run as lean as possible, reduce all the expenses, all the subscriptions. I look at every single software I was subscribed to and cancel almost every single one of them. Okay. So this inventory was just sitting in Amazon’s warehouse, right? It’s still selling, it was not, it’s nowhere close at the value that we were selling. But I have debt. I took a loan against my house to fund a business that I still need to pay off. So that, that pressure won’t go away, but

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the inventory is not selling at the same velocity like before. So that’s where the older pressure cooking situation built out. And that’s where I have a very, very difficult conversation with my wife because I wasn’t very honest with her. I didn’t tell her how much debt I put on through the business. I was just, I was there to say, okay, I’ve took a little bit of debt, but actually I took on 200,000. Wow. Okay.

14:57
So that was a very difficult conversation with my wife when I show her the numbers. So yeah. I can imagine. So, so you just went super lean. You got through 2020 and then what happened in 2021 that allowed you to recover and make $600,000 in revenue. I will say a few things. First of all, if you haven’t read the book Tractions for the listener, a hundred percent read that book. That book literally transformed my business and my life.

15:27
Do want to talk about, I’m sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with traction, but what are some of the things that you implemented with your business that had made a big difference? about six major component people, data, vision, factions, processes. And, that’s one more, but anyway, I spent six months studying it, master it and implement it throughout my entire business structure. that transformed my business and turn my business around.

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because of that business structure. for those of you who doesn’t know, Traction is written by a wonderful gentleman. His name is Geo Wickman. He is also a serious entrepreneur. He created a business operating system called EOS, which stands for Entrepreneur Operating System. And it’s just really a specific way to run a business. And this way of management philosophy can apply to any business, not just an e-commerce business. And I implement the system into my business to a T. I follow every single thing that was listed out in his book.

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I almost treated it like my business Bible for the, for the past year. So what about this system specifically contributed to sales, or is it just the fact that all the schools opened up again and you were generating sales again? It’s the vision in the book. You talk about the importance of have a very clear vision, have a core value for the business. Right now I have five core value for the businesses and I hire, I fire.

16:55
I train my entire team using it. So I know, I think it was in 2020 or I remember you telling me you ran out of stock and then Amazon sales dropped as a result of that, right? it’s actually one of the most frustrating things because of the limited cash flow we have. We always get inventory in and we couldn’t buy enough because I don’t have enough money on hand. So we are sold out after like one month.

17:21
Then the lead time for China is like three months, two to three months. So I was sold out for at least a few weeks waiting for the next shipment to arrive. But then I lose all the ranking, I lose everything. And I need to redo from scratch again for the inventory to come back. And this happened multiple times. So what I’m trying to get at here is, sure, you can, and I’ve read the book before, but any system that you implemented takes time, right?

17:47
And so I’m just kind of curious, I’m sure going forward for your business, the systems that you’ve implemented will be amazing for what you’re going to accomplish. But in the period of just from 2020 to 2021, what would you say change that allow you to achieve your revenue numbers?

18:07
I say besides the implementation is also we got a loan from SBA. Okay. That’s also a huge one that able to keep us cashflow positive. So I have enough money to buy inventory because that was the biggest struggle is I don’t have enough cash to buy inventory because with a container that I’m purchasing is like 30 or 40,000 for each container. And that’s a lot of money for me to put out from my own pocket when I have very limited

18:35
And I already max out all my credit card, I max out all my loans and I don’t have any other additional resources. So when the, I don’t know if you heard of the EIDL loan, which is a special loan that you can apply for, for, I think it’s stand for emergency disaster relief loan. I forgot the actual name for the, we are lucky enough. got 400,000 from SBA. So in 2020, you said you weren’t selling that many products. So you had an inventory glut.

19:03
But then that changed in the latter part of the year and then you sold out. I’m trying to get an idea what the timeline was. Uh, it’s kind of, it’s a mix. think it depends on the product because we have about six, seven products. Some product was, was doing okay, but we don’t have enough. Some product is not selling well and we have too much. So it’s a mix of both. Right. And you needed money to launch this new product, obviously. A hundred percent. Yes. So I know you’ve been burned by Amazon, uh, multiple times.

19:32
Yes. And at some point you were like, okay, forget Amazon. I’m going to, I’m going to start creating my own brand. Can we just kind of talk about what initiatives you took on to accomplish that goal? Yeah. And this is actually a perfect segue because I like to share an example for those that heavily focusing on Amazon for the Amazon seller that’s listening. We are playing in the casino called Amazon and

20:00
We have a fancy slot machine that print out $1 million a year. But guess what? Jeff Bezos with someone on Amazon can kick us out of the casino at any point. And that was kind of what happened to me.

20:16
I didn’t realize, sorry, when you’re talking about getting kicked out of the casino, did you mean the fact that you went out of stock and then your rankings tanked? Well, in that way, and I also have some of our listing shut down as well. So it’s a combination of those. Has Amazon knocked you off actually with their own private label brand at all? Not yet, because we’re in a smaller niche. Usually Amazon go after much bigger guy than I am. So what are you doing to

20:45
diversify off of Amazon? We focus heavily on email marketing. So currently we have about 35,000 email subscribers on our own email list and email marketing have been one of our core focus in 2021. So how do you build your email list? So I think we also learned something from your course and I bought so many different courses. So it’s just fun. All the different email marketing course I have bought, but it’s about building email sequences.

21:14
having weekly broadcast with newsletter. And I also write personal email sharing about what’s going on with my life sometimes just to build that relationship with my email list. And on the front end, we do two major strategy. First is we have a lead funnel. For those of you who want to check out all of my funnel and 100 % transparent, just go to SensoryDio.com. You’ll see all the funnel we have. We have like 20 different funnel right now. Do you want to spell that out just so people can go there? Yes, it’s Sensory.

21:42
S E N S O R Y deal D E D E A L dot com. Sensoradeal.com. Got it. That’s one of my domain. I own a lot of different domain. So that’s one of the domain. And what we do is we have two major funnel and you can actually go check out the page and you’ll see all the funnel we have, but two major types that were generating email is a free ebook download. And we drive directly into one of the funnels from Facebook to get email addresses.

22:12
The second funnel we run is a free plus shipping funnel, which is a very popular funnel for e-commerce businesses where we will sell the product for free. We only charge for shipping and usually the shipping is only $6.97. So it’s really affordable and it’s almost like impulse purchase on Facebook.

22:31
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

23:00
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

23:29
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. Let’s talk about that actually. So I know, and I’ve taught free plus shipping offers in the class, but you know, it’s or miss depending on what you do. And for us, like it was hit or miss for us until we finally found that one product that worked. What is your one product and what is your process? Yeah, that’s a certain criteria you need to hit for it to work.

23:59
So what was your process for determining that? We tried then launch it and see if worked. If it doesn’t work, we launch a new one. Well, let me rephrase that question. So what is like the cost of your product and are you taking a loss? Oh no, we are profitable without funnel. The idea for the free-flow shipping funnel is in the digital marketing world is often called self-liquidating funnel, So we generate enough profit from the funnel to break even so all the lead that’s coming through

24:28
We got free unlimited free lead. So can we talk about the funnel? So the product costs you how much? Uh, less than $2.00. Okay. And then to ship that is maybe like another $3.00. Okay. So you’re making like a buck maybe, right? Well, again, in the funnel, we do a lot of upsell and downsell is not just single product. Usually people buy multiple product. Our average car value for the funnel is about $25 right now, even though it’s only a $7 product.

24:58
So can we talk about the upsells? So what is the product? The product itself, if you go visit SensoryDio.com, you’ll see in the middle of the page is a Fidget Marble Maze. It’s a very basic sensory toy that we designed it with a marble in it that the kids can push through the marble. It’s great for fine motor skills and, know, tactiles and, you know, great. It’s just a great silent fidget toy. And it’s our best selling product that got suspended by Amazon, by the way. Okay. Let’s not get into that. But okay.

25:28
So that’s the offer. And then what is the upsell and what is the downsell? Upsell is we have multiple offers. So usually you get the best price if you buy three. So most of the customer will buy three. That’s the best like a bundle offer. Then we also have digital product because as a company we sell physical product, we sell digital product, we also sell digital courses and we also sell paid membership. Okay, wow. That’s okay. So what is working the best in terms of the upsells?

25:58
Digital product. I’ll take rate for a ebook bundle we sell for $10 is 20 % and ebook is 100 % profit and we just make $10 prior profit out of the funnel for the buyers. is this ebook about? I would imagine as a parent of an autistic child, I would want to buy anything that could help me. It’s a behavior blueprint ebooks about different strategy you can use with your kids to manage the behavior issues. Yeah. Nice. And how much do you charge for this ebook?

26:27
It’s a ebook bundle. So it’s multiple ebook in that bundle. I forgot how many ebook we offer in the bundle five or six or ten dollars. Ten dollars. Nice. Nice. Okay. And that’s a hundred percent profit. Okay. Yeah. For the ads, is it pretty easy to target people with? I don’t know how much you want to talk about that. But I’m just curious. I mean, because Facebook is getting harder and harder, just like Amazon’s getting harder and harder with the iOS update.

26:56
We are kind of struggling right now to really break even on a funnel like we used to before. So I know that all the audiences that Facebook generates is getting harder, but the ones that are interest-based, you know, like with the sensory autism, always take away the interest targeting as well. know, know. The basis, did they take away that category for you? Not an entire category, but some of the interest targeting we used to use got taken away. Yeah.

27:25
Okay. You know what, let’s talk about community. Cause I know, let’s see, what do you have? You have like a whole bunch of different clubs, right? You have the, I have them written down here somewhere. So we have a free community called Sensory Deal, which they can search it on Facebook, then you can join. But it’s just a free community that we share deals of our sensory product. It could be a physical product deal. could be a physical product deal or a deal with some of our partner, you know, and

27:54
that is one of the free community. Then we have a pay community where we charge $20 a month is called Sensui Adventure Club. For $20 a month, you get like lessons that you can watch alongside with your kids. As we partnered with a gentleman, he owned a wonderful business called Sensui Fitness, which his name is Matt. He had over 10 years of experience of being a personal trainer, a special education teacher, and a certified occupational service assistant.

28:23
And he create program to help kids with special needs. You have a lot of businesses all in one. I’m counting like five off the top of my head here. Yes. How people do you have and how do you operate all of these entities? It’s all under the same roof. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So let me just list off the ones I saw here. You have sensory adventure club, ask an autism mom live and then sensory fitness live, right?

28:50
Yes, that’s the show. Those are free. Those are not generally revenue, just like a show that we run. Okay. But the club is the paid membership, right? The club is a new pay. We just launched it few months ago. We are still working on some of the back end set up to make sure it’s running more smoothly, but it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty new membership. Let’s talk about the content that you’re putting out. What is your strategy there?

29:13
We are actually revamping our entire strategy right now. I want to be very, very more hands-on, maybe starting next quarter, because I have two startup companies, LockyKey is just one of them. Oh my goodness. Okay. Yeah. The second startup is actually a, I don’t know if I can share it on the podcast, but it’s an e-commerce digital marketing agency. We help seven figure e-commerce businesses to grow beyond Amazon. Nice. Okay. And is content part of the strategy?

29:42
Yes, 100%. Uh, so we have a show, we have a podcast that I would love for you to be a guest on my podcast as well. Cool. You want to tell people what the podcast is called? It’s called Scent, uh, seller feel life seller S E L L E R F U E L life seller fuel live. Okay. Yeah. So the fuel life is so talk about your current content strategy for Locky kid. Yes. How often are you putting out content and what, what type of content is it?

30:12
So since COVID, we kind of scaled down a lot of the content marketing play that we used to do, but we used to do a lot of content marketing. Our core strategy is Facebook live stream. Then we repurpose our live show, which is a one hour interview into multiple different meaning content, which is exactly what Gary V does with a vendor media, I believe. We just do it on the smaller scale compared to Gary V, of course.

30:38
but we’ll repurpose it for Instagram, for YouTube, for TikTok, for every other social media channel based on our pillar content, which is the live show. I see. Okay. And then is the live show an interview based show or do you come up with an interview based? Usually it’s interview based. Sometimes we’ll share a strategy like a webinar based, but most of the time it’s interview based. We’ll interview expert in the space. For example, we’ll interview occupational therapists, we’ll interviews teachers.

31:07
Sometimes we’ll also interview other entrepreneurs that serving the same communities as well on our show. So outside of Amazon, the physical products on your own site, how are you driving? Is it mainly just your Facebook funnels that are driving traffic and sales to that? Yeah, all the cold top of level funnels, we use ClickFunnels. So this is something very unique that I don’t see a lot of people do is we use a combination of ClickFunnels and Shopify.

31:36
And ClickFunnels is for all the direct, what’s it called? Direct to consumer ads or direct response. Direct response is all to ClickFunnels. For branding, it’s all Shopify. So we use Shopify as a branding website where we use ClickFunnels as direct response advertising. Here’s what I’ve always wondered. I think ClickFunnels is kind of overpriced. What does ClickFunnels do?

32:04
that you can’t implement in Shopify. You make it a lot easier because this is the main difference. I’m a funnel fan boy, so I’m going to talk very highly about funnel because the main difference between a funnel and the website. Website, when people go in, there’s 100 different things they can do. They can click on your top menu, bottom menu, a button there and here. A funnel, that’s only a single call to actions. They can either buy or don’t buy. That’s it.

32:31
But that’s just a page. You can rip out all the headers and the footers on your Shopify store. you have integration with digital product inside the ClickFunnels and our membership inside ClickFunnels. We can do unlimited upsell and downsell. I know you can also do it similarly in a Shopify setup. We just prefer ClickFunnels. OK, so it’s just worth it from an ease of use perspective, basically.

32:55
Yes. And my sister, who is also my chief marketing officer, she is the best funnel builder on earth. Nice. Yeah. And then, so these communities, once you’ve developed them, you get them on the email list through one of your lead magnets and then you, and then you email them regularly. Is that the strategy? That’s okay. have a welcome sequence, abandoned car sequence, all the typical e-commerce sequence. And then we do weekly newsletter.

33:23
And sometimes I also send out personalized email about like what’s going on with my personal life, because I really want to create that personal bonding connection with our customer base. And we also run ambassador program and our ambassador program is very unique compared to a lot of other e-commerce brand as well. I think that’s really important. Actually. One thing that was compelling about your store when I went on it was the about page where you basically spelled out the main reason why you started the store in the first place.

33:53
And if I’m just shopping for sensory products, I’m to go to you because you actually have a story as opposed to just some random person who’s selling for profit. Yeah. But you know, not everyone look at that. Sometimes I think some, I think some of our customer by far is because of my story, but some people still will just buy on Amazon. Yeah. mean, Amazon, you don’t have the opportunity to tell your story, right? So a little bit, very limited. So yeah.

34:22
So you said you’re projected to do 1.2 million this year. What is going to be the primary revenue driver for that? We are launching seven new products this year. Seven new physical products? Seven new physical products. Yeah. Okay. And these are all custom designed private label products. That’s correct. Yes. Do you project this revenue coming from Amazon or your own store? I mean, you have 35,000 email subs.

34:47
So that RB, this is where I want to be by the end of this year. want to be at least 50, 50 instead of 80, 20 last year with 80 % Amazon. really want to increase my own Shopify and ClickFunnels sales this year. So it’d be 50, 50. Yeah. 35,000 email subs though, in this space. That’s really valuable. Can I just ask you what percentage of your revenue is email right now? On the Shopify side, I will say I need to check my Clavio account. haven’t checked for a while.

35:16
At least 20 % or 25 % from email. are you using this list to launch your Amazon products as well? 100%. Yes. Okay. All right. That’s our entire launch strategy is email plus PPC. That’s it. I see. So do you, how do you structure your launches? So are you sending email to take people directly to the product or you know, so what are you doing? We learned from SR Firestone because he does very, very well product launches and

35:45
I think his message is he will create an early bird page and have his entire list sign up for early bird discount. Then it’s just kind of do a lot of buildup before the product launch. Then he will do email like crazy. He would write like 14 emails during the product launch week and just promote a lot out of the product. what we do is we do a similar setup, but for Amazon, we will still do early bird for them to sign up to a dedicated email list. Then during the launch week,

36:15
We send out 14 emails to our list with a link to Amazon and Amazon coupon that’s embedded in our Amazon listing. So it’s very easy for them to redeem the coupon. They don’t even need a coupon code. All they need to click is just they need to click this button and you auto apply to coupon. So you’re just going for sales velocity here and not keyword searches. Because you are naturally rank. Okay. This is the beauty of external traffic when you deal with Amazon.

36:44
Amazon treat external traffic differently than anything else you do within Amazon. So you don’t have anyone do any searches, you’re just relying purely on external traffic velocity to launch your product. 100%. I do not do any of the shenanigans and like search, and buy. I mean, they work. is why it used to work. anymore. So they still work as long as it’s natural, like none of the two step URLs and that stuff worked that well, but just a plain old search actually works.

37:12
Yeah, but it won’t work if you do a Facebook ad anymore because technically it’s against the latest Amazon TOS where you cannot give out rebates. Sure. Assuming. Yeah. You know, what’s sad about all this is that people still do this all the time. Yeah, but you know, this is where the casino analogy come back is you’re going to get kicked out of the casino because the house always win doesn’t matter how house always win. Okay. So yeah.

37:42
Okay, so outside of Facebook ads, are you doing any other ads? Shopping, AdWords? We do Google ads and our Google ad strategy is all the ad traffic directly to one of our blog posts and the blog posts have embedded link in there that go directly to our Amazon listing. Okay. And in terms of inventory, is it all FBA or do you have your own like warehouse or intermediary?

38:09
We have a warehouse in Oregon and I actually just switched my warehouse from Chicago to Oregon because of the whole shipping debacle going on last year. And right now, instead of going to LA and Long Beach port, I’m using Tacoma port. Seattle. Seattle. Okay. Yes. Cool. Hey, Jason, I didn’t mean to grill you. I’m just very curious, you know, about your business. For anyone out there who wants to start a business,

38:37
I just want to ask you a couple of questions that are just kind of quick fire that I always ask my students. How much did you invest to launch your store?

38:46
Oh man, how much did I invest? Like just to get up until getting your first sale, let’s just say. I will say I didn’t start out with private label. So I started out with retail arbitrage for the first year. And what I did is I go to a surf store and buy used textbooks and I flip them on Amazon and eBay for like one year. That’s how I got my initial investment. Okay. But for Locky Kid. Yeah. I flipped all that profit from the textbooks into Locky Kid.

39:14
Well, yeah, I know. But how much did you spend to start Locky Kit? Not the retail arbitrage stuff? I would say at least $30,000. $30,000. Is it because you were doing your own private label products? Yes. Yes. So you must have made a pretty sizable first shipment then? Because I didn’t know better. I thought I need to order more. I see. Okay. So is it the bulk of that $30,000 inventory?

39:41
inventory and also shipping costs and also marketing costs because you know back then you can buy reviews so part of that goes away. yeah. In terms of your website are you technical person? I am not. No, I’m the visionary and I’m not a technical person. Yeah.

40:02
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

40:29
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut out ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

40:57
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

41:23
Was that one of the hard parts at all or was that one of the easier parts? Just getting your website and everything set up. That’s part of the 30,000. just hire someone. Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. So if you were to encapsulate your experiences, what would you say is your biggest challenge in getting started? Staying focused. Because I also have ADHD myself. So I always go, I always chase after the shiny object. Okay. Let’s try dropshipping.

41:51
Uh, let’s try wholesale. Let’s try private label. I mean, you have a lot of projects on your plate. have to admit, like I can only handle like a handful of projects at any given time. It’s just, I just can’t do it. Right now my focus in my business is I want to be the field Jackson on my industry and I want to be the head coach and uh, Phil Jackson is very well known for being a Zen master. And this is why I do with my team. do a group meditation every single week during our

42:21
team meeting and because I believe 90 % of all of our success is based on our mindset. It’s not a strategy. It’s not a tactic. It’s the mindset. I actually agree with you now. Back then, I used to think it was all strategy and tactics, but just in the course of teaching my class for like over a decade, a lot of this stuff, it’s not rocket science, right? It’s really just following through and being consistent about it.

42:49
And most of it, can hire a VA to do it. I mean, you don’t really do. I don’t do anything myself nowadays with my businesses. My main goal is to talk. Everyone else do. talk. So how much time did it take you to make your first sale? And again, I’m just talking about lucky kid here. It was pretty fast. If you assume as we listed on Amazon and we have some review going, the the sales already start happening the very next day.

43:18
Okay, so within a day or two? Yeah, yeah, yeah. was so easy back then. Oh my God. I miss those days. What about today though? Like you first all over from scratch. Let’s say you didn’t have that email list. That will be, I will go back and build my own email list from scratch again, because that’s very, very important in the ecosystem nowadays. Is your content strategy more valuable than your ads right now in generating email subs?

43:48
Well, I will say I’m actually still weak on organic social media. That’s something I’m still working with my team to get better on. Like we were not really good with Instagram, to be honest. We are okay with Facebook. We have about $13,000, but Instagram, kind of suck at it. So pay marketing is still one of the big focus for us right now. Okay. All right. So for someone who’s listening to this right now, who’s waiting on the sidelines and wanting to start a business.

44:17
What would be the main advice you would give them? would say think differently. Think differently in the turn as all the group out there always teach you to find the next gadget that you can make money. Don’t do that. Find the next tribe that you can serve. I completely agree. how, actually, how important is it to you to be passionate about what you’re selling?

44:43
100%. That’s my entire spiritual being. The whole reason of my existence on this earth is to serve, is to serve the family like I have. That’s why what all the things that happened to me happened. To give you another personal story, back in 2017, a few months after I started Lucky Kid, my older daughter got diagnosis with leukemia. Oh no. And that was really, really tough.

45:10
having a full-time job and a side business and two kids with special needs, one was autism, one was leukemia.

45:20
It was very bad. can’t even imagine. But you know what? I’m already at the end of the tunnel. She’s already in full remission now. But during that two and a half year, I really don’t know how I even wake up in the morning.

45:35
You know, the reason why I asked you that question is because I am not passionate about our products, but I am passionate about our business. So it’s, it’s interesting to get a different person’s perspective on all that. I think it helps if you can become passionate for both, then you get so much momentum. That’s why I always tell my team, I don’t drink coffee because I get high with water. I can only imagine you on caffeine. That’d be kind of scary.

46:05
Hey, well Jason, if anyone has any questions or if anyone out there listening has a child with ADHD or autism, where can they find more information? They can visit our corporate homepage, lakikid.com, which is spelled as L-A-K-I-K-I-D.com, or they can visit sens3do.com. That’s also one of our pages. And for the teachers out there, you can visit

46:33
sensoryinclusiveclassroom.com. That’s a special program we have for the school. You know, one thing that just struck me is how come you have three different websites for the same business? Different business. Like I say, the luckykid.com is really just a branding website, a branding page. SensoryDL is more for direct response and it’s called a funnel hub. That is a, I think, a concept pioneered by Russell Bronson.

47:01
because he’s like a king of funnels and we have built so many funnels over the year but no one can find any of our funnels because we have so many so we decided to okay let’s put it on the same domain so we can find it. And for teachers rather than putting like just a wholesale tab on Locky Kid what is the reason for having a separate site for that? Because this is a new program we are working on launching this year actually. Originally this program is supposed to launch in 2020 and you know what happened to the school.

47:30
The idea of the program is to give you a 30 second overview is we have an ongoing partnership with a wonderful nonprofit organization called Culture City. They have over 600 locations across the United States, Canada, UK and Australia. One of the biggest programs they have is called Sensory Inclusive Initiative, which they have participating locations like NBA stadiums, football and baseball arenas, zoos, aquariums, cruise ships and airports. And last year they got into police stations.

47:58
And what they do in all those locations, they will do three things. They will provide staff training. So the staff aware of the sensory challenges when family like bind, when I take my son to the stadium, they’ll get sensory overloaded. You’ll have a meltdown, you’ll have a tantrum. So the training is important. Second, they also provide sensory backs. Inside the sensory backs have a physical tool like noise canceling headphones.

48:24
and also one of our product, which is a writable weighted blanket that we designed for Culture City. And then last but not least, they also help all those locations to build sensory rooms, which is a safe and quiet space for the family to go to. And this year we want to take this same program that we’re doing with Culture City in the NBA stadiums, we want to take it to the public school environment by providing training to the teacher, providing sensory toys and tools to the teachers.

48:52
and help school to build sensory rooms. That’s amazing, actually. I just, you have so many projects going on. I know you’re going to be successful. So maybe we’ll check back in like a year or two and see how everything’s going. But I really appreciate you coming on the show, Jason. Thanks a lot for your story. And my long-term vision and my dream is go back to help the family in Asia. And I’m happy to say I’m ready to do that.

49:18
This year we’re expanding into Amazon Japan and Amazon Singapore and Amazon Canada. Nice. Wow. That’s a lot of, a lot of stuff to do in a year, man. I believe my team can do it. Uh, I’m the cheerleader and I’m the coach of the team. My team will go, go out and accomplish all this goal. Well, best of luck to you, Jason. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much.

49:41
Hope you enjoyed that episode and that is a wrap for student month. Now, bringing these student interviews to you, I hope you got an accurate view of what it’s like to start an e-commerce business from complete scratch. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 397. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base.

50:06
SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, I’ve got a banner card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.

50:32
Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLA V I Y O. Now I talk about how I these tools on my blog, and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.