595: How To Launch A 75k/month Tiktok Shop With 0 Followers

00:00
Welcome to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. Now in this episode, Ian from Bullseye Sellers and I dive deep into how regular people with zero followers are building $75,000 a month businesses on TikTok Shop. We’ll break down exactly how this is happening, why it’s working right now, and what it takes to launch successfully without a big audience or ad budget. So if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by all the noise online or unsure where to start,

00:28
This episode is a step-by-step, behind-the-scenes look at a strategy that’s actually working right now. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that session recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now available over at SellerSummit.com. If you missed the event, you can now get instant access to every keynote, workshop, and panel. Now, on to the show.

00:55
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I am thrilled to have Ian Page on the show. And Ian is the founder of Bullseye Sellers, where he helps e-commerce sellers launch on the TikTok Shop platform. And right now TikTok Shop is hot. It’s exploding with an expected GMV of over $50 billion this year. And it does convert four and a half times higher than traditional social media.

01:20
In this episode, we are going to break down Ian’s strategies on how to successfully launch your brand on TikTok, what it takes, what products work well on the platform. And with that, welcome to show Ian. How you doing today, man? Thank you for having me, Steve. I’m doing well. I’m in beautiful Pennsylvania. Where are you? I’m in California where the weather is perfect. I think I’m going to go for run right after this. I had the same thing. It’s like 75 degrees and sunny outside, so maybe I’ll go for a run with you.

01:49
So Ian, many the listeners I know you were at at seller summit, but many of my listeners probably do not know who you are. So I want to know how you got started in e commerce and how did you end up specializing in tick tock shop in particular? It all started with a back brace. In 2015, a back brace, a back brace. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I did a SM five. For those who don’t know, it’s an amazing selling machine. I know you know, Steve. Yep.

02:18
And it was one of those, it felt like a multi level marketing scam because all my friends were trying to get a commission off me and sell me the course. And it was like overpriced. And I was like, I don’t know about this, but you know, I had that entrepreneurial itch and I had a day job and pretty much in a cubicle and kind of that nine to five lifestyle. And I just wanted to get out of that. Um, wow, that was 10 years ago and, um, I bought the course. I just gave in. was like, all right.

02:46
screw it, I’m just going to give it a try. I’m to learn Amazon. And the course after completing it led me to a clavicle support brace. You know how you pick your first product that you. yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I did some custom designing on it because when it, when it came from China, I was like kind of unhappy with it. It felt uncomfortable. So I actually like did a bunch of like custom designing on it with the manufacturer and it took off the clavicle support launched selling like a hundred, 200 units a day. And I was like, man, this is easy.

03:16
And I later to find out it’s not that easy for everybody, but I got, I got lucky. I had the right product at the right time. And I actually had a really early exit because what happened was I had a, a competitor that reached out to me that was a little annoyed at my presence and made me an offer. And I actually sold the brand, which at that point had a few skews in 2017. So I wasn’t actually in the e-comm space personally for too long. had immediate success and a quick.

03:45
exit. And then what happened in 2017 2018, a lot of my friends were asking me for advice. So you know, that’s just so common in the e commerce space of like, know, you know, guy who knows a guy and he’s in they stumble over each other to get your phone number and ask Ian because Ian is an e commerce expert or whatever they think I am, which I really wasn’t, I just knew a couple things. So I started doing a lot of like free consulting to friends.

04:15
And then, um, one thing led to another. And I was like, maybe I could charge for this, you know, maybe I should just sell my time. So I started selling hourly packages of consulting. And then one thing led to another. And I was like, I can’t scale this. Like I can’t scale my own hours in the day. That’s not possible. So I think maybe I should like start an agency and see what happens. And that was 2018, 2019 bulls eye sellers was born. So that’s where bulls eye came from really is all came from a back brace.

04:45
How did that lead to tick tock? Yeah. So the way that led to tick tock was in 2020. God, it was only last year. I was looking for an old number and it was only last year. Last year we went to prosper. My agency, uh, um, staff and I, think there, think eight of us went from bullseye and tick tock shop had a big booth there at prosper. And it was the coolest booth at prosper. mean, it was like lying out the door. People trying to talk to tick tock. Um,

05:14
And I already knew there was a TikTok shop. already knew viral on TikTok was always a thing and everyone wanted to go viral, but I didn’t really know like the weeds of it. Like what does it take? So I met with TikTok shop and the first thing they said is you have to become a TSP. was like, what is a TSP? They’re like, it’s TikTok shop partner. You have to become a TSP and before you can really do anything. Once you’re a TSP, you can, you’re in. And I was like, okay. So I applied and um,

05:43
supposedly it was really hard to become TSP. didn’t know. Um, cause I had a lot of peers that were like still waiting for their approval and I got approved within a month. Nice. And then, and then I was like, well, what do we do now? You know what I mean? Like, you know, I’m a, I’m a TSP. I’m an official tick tock shop partner, but I don’t know tick tock at all. And what do I do with this new found, uh, you know, license as a partner. And, um, so here’s what we did. We basically,

06:11
called all of our existing Amazon clients. had all my, all my account managers literally reach out to every single one and say, Hey, we will manage your tick tock shop for free commission only because we need to learn how to do this. And we already manage your Amazon. have asset. have all your assets. We already have this communication and this connection. Can I, for 8 % of your sales on tick tock represent your account? And of course everyone was like, sure. Because they were like sales.

06:40
It’s free sales. Like if you guys can get it and we give you 8 % and there’s no retainer, we’ll take it. Um, so we did that from right when I got back, uh, from prosper last year and I got that TSP official, whatever, which ended up not really helping me in the first year. And it’s helping me now. And we, uh, we got about 12 of our clients on Tik TOK and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute nightmare. Okay. We, we got rejected like 15 times and

07:09
documents never worked. And it was like, driver’s licenses were rejected, we just couldn’t get a break. It took six months, from March to October, to actually learn how to get a someone on TikTok shop in a reasonable amount of time. So I’m so glad I didn’t charge a retainer. It would have been such a nightmare. My turn would have been terrible. So was like, so happy. I was like, there’s no pressure. It’s commission only just figured out, you know, yeah. And then in October, we made our first sale.

07:39
Literally it was like middle of October, we had a skincare client and they’re now my number one client on Tik Tok actually. And they sell an eczema product and we got our first sale on Tik Tok through an affiliate video. And we were like, Oh my God, we, we are Tik Tok talk shop experts. Like literally right at that point, I was like, yeah, man, I’m an expert. Um, and then October led into the holiday season.

08:08
And that same brand did like 10 G’s in December. And it was like, wow, like this is something we can scale. That same brand did 25 G’s in January this year. They did 35 or maybe 38 in February. They broke 50 G’s in March. They broke 75 G’s in April. And right now they’re hovering at that 75 mark. Um, so they’re my biggest brand that we started from $0. Without a takeoff presence. would imagine.

08:36
from the first sale. They actually, they were banned on Tik TOK. They handed us over the account and they’re like, we actually banned ourselves because we didn’t know what we were doing, just getting it approved. So they were like negative, you know? Right. So yeah, that’s the journey of Tik TOK. It’s not this like, it’s not this like beautiful romantic story. It’s like us just like knocking our heads against the wall for six months and figuring it out. And I think that’s what a lot of people are still doing. And that’s why there’s a, there’s a big industry here now in the agency space.

09:05
manage the TikTok shops. There aren’t too many of you guys out there just yet. Maybe it’s because it’s the wild wild west so far, but it’s the wild west. Yeah, I am interested in seeing what you had to say about it. Now I know Amazon has been squeezing sellers and buyers more than ever before. And a lot of sellers are looking for alternative platforms and marketplaces to sell. So in your mind, if you’re already selling on Amazon in your own store, where does TikTok shop?

09:32
fall in the overall strategy and the priorities of selling to you? To me, it’s about timing. And what that means is where you’re at financially, because I don’t believe that a brand should stretch themselves too thin when they’re in the startup phase. And I would call that in the six figure a year phase. Okay. So if you’re a quarter million dollar seller on Amazon, I wouldn’t spend half your time trying to crack tick tock, I think you’ll go broke. I really do. Because you’re not getting enough profit from your quarter million.

10:00
to also seed samples to also pay for maybe expensive early ads on TikTok. And I think you’re going to stretch yourself too thin with your inventory and you’re not going to succeed on either platform. Okay. So what is the range that you recommend then? Seven figures on Amazon. And it’s very rare that we don’t take a client that’s not seven figures. The only times I won’t take a client that’s under seven figures on Amazon is if they already have other brands or they, just know that their capital.

10:29
infused and they can support the tick tock journey. If they’re not, and they’re bootstrapping the hell out of it. I wouldn’t recommend anybody hire an agency to do tick tock. And I say the same thing with meta Steve, like, I don’t, I don’t believe that a new seller should be like dabbling in meta dabbling in Google ads dabble. You know, I just feel like people get overly excited about all these different places that they can sell their products. And they’re masters of none, really, at that relief at that early stage.

10:58
Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. Just pick one medium, master it, and then move on to the next one. Make your money, pull your money, put it into other places once you’re ready. So what I would like to do first is to get people excited about TikTok. Tell me about some of the big wins. You already mentioned that eczema skincare company. What are the expectations here on the growth that you should see? Well, let me go back to that because that that eczema skincare company, when I say $75,000 a month on TikTok, it might sound like it’s not a lot, but what

11:27
what it really is, is five to 8 million impressions a month. That’s what they’re averaging. Wow. Okay. So five to 8 million impressions a month. Going to your Amazon store. And the reason I say going to your Amazon store is we found that 50 to 70 % of people with intent to buy on tik tok will actually prefer buying on Amazon. So they’ll, they’ll get inspired by a tik tok video, they’ll search the product on Amazon, and then rather prime it and get it the same day.

11:57
Okay. I’m sure most of our listeners here, you’re going to agree if you find something on Tik TOK, what’s more convenient than buying that same product on Amazon. Right. So that eczema skincare brand is seeing success that they’ve never seen before. They’re, they’re listing on Amazon for the same product is three X from when we started. Wow. Okay. Okay. Um, and it was actually kind of a dying brand. This was a brand friend of mine that for the last two years was just losing market share every single year, slowly to more competitors.

12:27
their cost per clicks were basically out being, they were like being bit out because they couldn’t afford those costs per clicks. So they were in that situation where just slowly losing market share on Amazon. And then we reversed that with this TikTok strategy. So there’s a halo effect on Amazon. What about their store? Did it have a hell effect as well? Yeah. Yeah. Their, their DTC saw a 25 % increase.

12:54
What we surveyed is 11%, which I think is probably more accurate. So, um, let’s say a hundred people see your video on tech talk and they all want to buy what we’ve surveyed to our audience. Uh, we have a huge shopper network that we surveyed regular people. And we said, where would you go? 11 % said, I’ll go to the website. 62 % say I’ll go to Amazon and the other what? 30%, 28 % or whatever that number is said, I’ll just buy it on tech talk.

13:24
So we are seeing that spillover on their website and on Amazon and their overall lift on e-commerce is way up because of that 75 grand off TikTok. So that’s the bigger reason why you do TikTok. So of those sales on TikTok, because I know you had to give away a commission and then there’s fees and whatnot, is the TikTok sales itself profitable or are you mainly relying on the halo effect for this whole operation to be profitable overall? Barely profitable.

13:53
I think their profit now is about 10,000 a month. so 10,000 on 75,000 in sales. Yeah, so that would not be a great contribution margin with Amazon if someone’s doing that. And so when you’re measuring the halo effect here, you would just kind of extrapolate out the sales that you would normally get and everything else. I assume this brand isn’t doing anything else, right, except for TikTok Shop. Okay. That’s it, that’s all we’re doing. Nice.

14:23
Yeah, okay. They even they even showed out on their Google ads. And they actually like have, you know, taken some of their Amazon PPC budget, Google budget, and they’ve given it to us. So I do know since I’m on TikTok, there are certain things that work better than others. And I just want to, I want you to just tell the audience here, what products work well, I know you have a screening process involved with the product, and you kind of describe what that is. I want brand focused products. So what that means is like, let’s just take

14:51
you know, any old product like this, you know, that this charger here, this is not a brand, this is a charger, right? Okay. So if someone even if it’s a cool charger, if someone watched a video, and this was like a unique charger, but it wasn’t really brand focus, like didn’t have like the branding all over it, the box wasn’t heavily branded, what’s going to happen is people are going to watch the video, and 60 70 % are going to go off tiktok platform, and they’re going to have a difficult time finding you and identifying you versus the other competitors on Amazon.

15:20
That’s going to be like a Swiss cheese situation where you’re basically just paying to get sales for everyone else. And maybe you get a little bit. I don’t want that. So what I would rather have is brand focused products where it’s very easy for the consumer that’s watching the video to be like, Oh yeah, brand blah charger. And they only go to your listing. So that’s the first thing that we filter out when we’re talking to people. Cause we talked to a lot of Amazon sellers who just sell stuff. Right.

15:51
I don’t really want people that just sell stuff. I want people who are building a brand. So what is your definition of brand here? I mean, you mentioned having a box and you know, with your, I mean, that’s like par for the course today, right? So what, what, what else are you looking at? Yeah, I’m looking at a shop with consistent products, not just a bunch of products that you sell because they have, okay, that all fall under like the same niche and they’re okay. Trying to build a portfolio. Okay. Got it. Okay. That’s right. Okay. Um, yeah, so that’s number one. And then number two, and

16:21
This doesn’t disqualify you, but this just highlights the type of client that does better is a high LTV consumable for sure. So if, if, know, if you have a supplement brand, a skincare brand, a haircare brand, something like that, you can absorb those costs, you know, for the affiliate commission, the Tik TOK commission.

16:45
the ads, all that are much easier for you to absorb because you get the repeat customer and you know that your LTV is, let’s say it’s 15 % of sales is going to result in two more orders or whatever that metric is. So that’s, that’s number two, it doesn’t disqualify you, but I would definitely say if you are in that category, you’re already on you’re already like on my radar is a great prospect for TikTok. you have an example of a product that is not a consumable? That’s one of your clients that has found success? Yeah.

17:13
We have a toy brand that sells bath toys for kids light up bath toys, little squeaky bath toys. They had this great product. That’s like a mold free. It doesn’t have that little hole in it. Right. So it’s like a mold free light up little squeaky bath toys. had a viral video back in April that just went nuclear and they completely sold out on Amazon. Um, and the ROAS was awesome. I think their cost per order was like a buck 50 for like a $12 product. So they were like,

17:42
thrilled and they didn’t care that it wasn’t a repeat customer because it was a profitable sale every single time for that product. So and they were very well branded. Again, that’s one of those things where a squeaky bath toy could easily just be a product but they definitely have a good brand and they really made it branded so people could could find them on Amazon. do they have cross sells for other stuff related to bath products or whatever that they’re taking advantage of or is it just that main product?

18:07
Mainly because you know, I’m sure they do because they have other fun bath products. But we definitely on tik tok shop saw that two of their products were really just getting 90 % of the sales got it because on tik tok people are pretty impulse by right like they’re they’re not they’re not hunting. They’re sitting on a couch and they’re being hunted for you know, it’s the reverse right? Right. So they’re just going oh, that’s fun. I think my little toddler is gonna love that I’m gonna buy it.

18:36
And maybe three months down the line, if you’re lucky, they might think what was that brand about the bath toys from because I want to get something else. So it’s a little bit, a little bit I personally think that their memory on tik tok is going to be not quite as loyal to a brand as it would on Amazon. Sure. Because they’re being hunted in the initial in the initial sale. Okay.

19:03
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19:32
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

19:43
Yeah. Okay. So consumables is a plus. What else do look for? So obviously, I look for someone who can afford to talk I like to say eight to 10k a month. Okay, and that and that would include my retainer. And so if you’re doing it yourself, I would say six to seven k a month. Because if you can’t afford six to seven k a month for six months, knowing that like, I literally mean, like that money is going away.

20:11
So you are investing six to seven K for six months. So that’d be like, what $42,000 $45,000. If you can handle that, and you’re, it’s almost like don’t invest money in the stock market that you’re not willing to lose that same concept. Sure. Right. Okay. We’re to be much more successful because you’re not going to squirm or the moment we get a 1.2 ROAS or the moment something doesn’t go right.

20:40
So I would say if you’re doing yourself six to seven K, that would include the cost for you to sample your products out. That would include the commissions to the affiliates. And if you are including an agency, I would go up to 10 to 12 K because I would also pay for the agency as well. What is the timeframe that you expect to get a better ROAS? I can understand burning cash in like the first X number of months.

21:09
What is the expectation? Six months. Six months, okay. And the reason being, and I say that more of like, you can expect to be at a profit in six months if you have the right agency partner. Okay. I see guys doing it themselves that are eight months in and they’re still losing money. So I’d say if you have someone that knows their stuff, you can be profitable in six months. Okay, so the expectation here is be willing to lose, let’s say 10K a month for six months, $60,000 investment.

21:38
This is no different than meta ads, for example, in the beginning, you’re just panning for gold, right? Yep. You’re gonna lose money in the beginning. Yep. Okay. And a big part of it’s the sampling. Okay, so we just did a webinar with Mary Ruth, the CRO, his name is Jay Hunter, I recommend checking that on my on my YouTube, I’ll shout out to my YouTube, just type in bullseye sellers, you’ll find it. It’s a great webinar because they’re doing they’re projected to do 70 million this year on TikTok.

22:07
So they’re in the top 10. They’re like in that they’re they’re hanging out with tick tock corporate at the office. They’re at that level. So but they started at zero January 2024. They were at $0. within only 16 months from zero to 70 million on a year is insane. Yeah. They told me that the reason why people fail this what Jay said the reason why most people fail on tick tock is they just don’t continue.

22:35
They squirm, they send out 100 samples, some videos come back, the videos suck. This is what happens, right? And they put a little ad dollars behind the videos, they spend 500 bucks, they get no sales, and they’re like, screw TikTok. I’m just gonna go back to Amazon. I think that can be said about any content platform, right? If you start a YouTube channel, you gotta keep with it for at least a year. Same with anything, right? That’s true. That’s true.

23:04
And it’s no different on Tik TOK. So what, what Jay said is they’re sampling. They really ratcheted up their sampling and they just got less picky about who they, you know, sent them out to. I asked Jay point blank on the call. I was like, you guys are the big dogs. Who are you sampling? Just, you know, are you looking for those Kylie Jenner influencers? Are you sampling plain old mom and pop affiliates? And he’s like, if they have an 80 % post rate, meaning for each sample they receive, they post 80 % of the time of video.

23:33
or higher, I will send them a sample. I don’t care about their GMB history. I don’t care anything else. I’m like, wow. You mean 80 % of the people that receive a product actually do at least one video? Is that what you mean? The the post rate is a metric on TikTok for the affiliate. Okay, so that’d be I received 100 products and samples this month and I did videos on at least 80 of them. Okay, basically you’re measuring whether they’re going to take action.

24:02
That’s exactly right. Okay. So he said if they have an 80 % or higher, I don’t care about their GMV, which is their sales metrics. I will send them a sample. Interesting. Okay. And they’re huge. So the point is, is they’re not getting pickier. They’re getting less picky as time goes on. I mean, I’ve noticed, uh, tick tockers make a ton of money when they have like hardly any subs. Uh, there’s been a lot of case studies on that. So maybe that’s why the theory like it’s panning for gold, right? It’s like playing the lottery in a way.

24:32
And he knows that he knows his cogs. So he knows that he’s sending on a sample to get 300 impressions. Like he knows that that’s what he’s factoring in. I’m getting 300 impressions. Okay. Okay. If I get more than that, that’s a bonus. And if I can get a spark ad and turn that 300 impressions into a monetized sponsored ad and it does well, great. That’s a bonus too, but he just factors in cog sample out equals 300 impressions.

25:04
Let me ask you this, and I’m sure you don’t know his numbers, but of those 300 impressions, what would the expected conversion rate be or just a ballpark? What would you expect to be a good conversion rate on that? Yeah, I don’t know those numbers, but, um, I mean, is it higher than Amazon or is it much lower? I would imagine it’s lower, right? Yeah, it’s, definitely lower because it’s not, it’s not, it’s not bottom of the Yeah, no, it’s not. But what happens is, and what Jay was saying on the call is.

25:33
If you do that enough times, you appear to be everywhere. And the average person starts to see your videos that that eight to 10 times, which is what they need to see in order to be like, okay, I’m going to buy the product. Um, and you have that appearance. See of just being everywhere. it. Okay. That’s like Alex Hamrozi strategy. A hundred percent. Yeah. And you can’t, you can’t be everywhere on Amazon. You can’t write the platform doesn’t allow you to be everywhere. You’re only with intent. That’s it. And

26:03
The other downfall of the Amazon strategy is you are as good as your, as your competitor to your left and to your right. If you’re a little bit more expensive and you don’t have enough differentiation, you’re losing. If you’re a little bit cheaper, um, but your reviews aren’t as good, you might still be losing. So you’re only as good as the guy to your left and to your right, or, if it’s mobile above you or below you. with tick tock, you don’t have to worry about your competitors. There are no competitors.

26:32
It’s just between you and the person watching your video at that moment in time. Okay. Got it. All right. So now, now that at least I have a better idea of how this all works, what is the process that you guys take to take a brand with zero TikTok presence and then grow it to, I guess, break even within six months? Yeah. I like to say 50 K within six months. That’s what we always do. Okay. Sure. 50 K a month in six months.

26:58
So the first thing is we have to cut out the shop set up time. We’ve gotten that down to under a week. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Because if we spin our wheels on that time is money. That’s an upset client. We don’t want that. So we got it down to under a week, unless you’re in a really tough category, like weight loss or something. And if there’s FDA approvals, it might go to 10 days, but for most products, it’s under a week. Um, and then right after that, we’re using a, our sister company, sell a code to basically do giveaways.

27:27
So we’re actually in the giveaway business too now because, um, tick-tock is aware that there’s this cold start period where they don’t allow you to do much. So it’s kind of a catch 22 because as soon as your shop is live, they’re like, good, you can only outreach to 2000 people a week on the affiliate network and you have no sales. So those 2000 people are probably going to ghost you. Right. You have no reviews. So the consumer is not going to buy any of your products.

27:57
And we’re going to limit the amount of people that you’re allowed to talk to because you haven’t made any sales, you haven’t proven yourself. So it’s kind of an impossible situation. So the way we get out of that is we have our own shopper network that we created with the seller, seller Co. And we basically just pay for our own GMB. So we say, we tell our clients upfront, you’re going to give away a couple hundred units. And you’re going to basically, we’re going to pay upfront for those units, full retail price, and then we’re going to send shoppers to your shop.

28:27
And they’re gonna really make a purchase, check out the products going to be shipped, that’s going to increase your shop score, it’s going to show tick tock that you’re making sales. And then we’re gonna ask them to write reviews. Okay. So that’s the first 30 days usually, this is like old school Amazon, dude, it’s right back to where it was. And I was so nervous about doing this because Amazon’s been so hard on this. And then I talked to guys at tick tock corporate, and they love it. They love it so much.

28:57
We’re that we’re in the tick tock, um, Lark channel, which is like tick tock Slack. So we can actually talk to people at tick tock. We love it so much that they’re like tagging my name and tagging other people’s names and saying, Hey, can you show the seller your, uh, your, uh, cold start solution? Because they constantly getting that type of messaging from sell it from, from other agencies. So like, I’m actually like getting leads from tick tock for this other service.

29:26
Hilarious. Okay, so you have this database of shoppers who want free stuff, right? Just like the old days of Snag Shout. Yeah, or like Rebakey. It’s kind of like that. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And so you’re basically just jump starting the reviews on your shop. That’s right. Right. Okay. So that creates the necessary social proof for the other people want to jump on board. That’s right. Okay. And we’re getting through the $2,000. What’s called the $2,000 GMV threshold. That’s what it’s called.

29:56
So you have to sell $2,000 with the stuff for TikTok to, to allow you to expand. Yep. I have it right here. If I can share my screen, I’ll show you, but I, uh, yeah, I have a good old chat GPT for everybody here. So here are the thresholds. I’m going to have to do entire screen cause it’s not finding my chat GPT. So if you haven’t made a single sale, you can’t outreach to anybody.

30:26
Wow. Kind of weird, right? You can’t do anything. Can you buy your own stuff though to jumpstart that? Yeah, but it has to be through an affiliate. Ah, okay. So take tax gonna have to do something about this. But because it’s a little bit of a cat. It’s really the definition of a catch 22. Right. Once you get $2,000 in sales, then, or once you have a single sale up to 2000

30:55
then you’re allowed to reach out to 2000 creators a week. Okay. 2000 creators is nothing. sounds like a lot though, but it’s nothing. Okay. The reason why it’s nothing is because you’re going to get ghosted because you’re a brand new product. Okay. Then if you have 2000 to 50,000 sales, it over three X is your outreach per week. So that’s why I, that’s why we’re always like focused on that two K to get right here. Got it. Okay.

31:23
And then obviously once we get to 50 K, which we’re not going to see products for $50,000. No one’s going to pay for that. That’s when it’s just complete unlimited outreach at that point. me an idea of how many creators you guys typically reach out to in a given week, because even 7,000 sounds like a ton. Yeah, we usually max out. Okay. Yeah. We get about five process or is that a manual process? It is a, um,

31:52
A little bit of both, a little bit of both. Um, we, we use some really good software partners that help us automate it because we’re, we’re managing 38 shops right now. So obviously like with 38 shops, we’re not going to be doing it all manual, but there are some components that have to be manual. Um, especially when we have a video that performs well, we manually reach out to that person and invite them into a discord channel where we can have much better dialogue with that individual and like do more long-term strategy with that affiliate.

32:22
But I’d it’s like 90 % automated at this point for us. But for the individual, not you guys per se, like, do you typically have to go through each creator and hit like the invite button? Or is there a software? Unless you sign up for a software. I’ll do some call-outs. Uptick.io, U-P-T-K dot I-O is great. There’s another one called Reacher, ReacherApp.com.

32:50
These are softwares where you can basically set thresholds and parameters. Like I want people, I want females. want, um, you know, um, people that have dog channels or whatever, right. For dogs or, know, whatever threshold you want, or you can say, I want people with 80 % or higher post-rate, or I want people that have their GMB levels here. So we will usually max out that 7k and we usually get about a 5 % response rate.

33:19
out of 7k so that’s 350 people responding saying yeah I’m interested to work with you and out of those 350 we’re gonna we’re gonna probably distill that down to about 200 affiliates that we work with that week every single week. So of those 350 who respond you you distill it down to 200 before you send out samples or are you sending out same usually usually because we let them respond and then sometimes it fizzles sometimes just you know they they never take the sample.

33:48
other times, we, we, we, we only have a limit or a budget with our client of 200 samples. So if we have more people than we need, we’re going to pick our favorites out of those 350 for the week, and then they bench the other 150 for next week, right? Right. Because none of our clients tell us, Hey, you can send out unlimited samples. That does not happen. Everyone has limits. Yeah.

34:16
But it seems like in the beginning, you’re pretty much constrained to 350 at most, right? Based on the percentage. It’s just a numbers game, right? So it’s a numbers game. Yeah, you are. You are pretty much constrained. So at most 350, it sounds like samples every week. At most and in the early stages. Yeah, right. In early stages. Like Mary Ruth, for example, is doing about seven to 10,000 samples a month. You know, they’re at that level where they can manage that. Right. Yeah. Okay. That’s crazy.

34:46
So when you’re talking about profitability overall, you’re factoring the cost of those samples, right? 100%. Okay. All right. We’re tracking sample cost MCF fulfillment. If you’re using MCF, if you’re doing a three PL, we’ll factor that in. Um, if you’re invited by tick-tock for FBT, which is another subject we can talk about, and it’s really exciting. Um, we factor that in and, um, now another thing you should know, and I want, I want people to know this. You don’t have to pay the same rate to the affiliate. If you’re running an ad on their video.

35:16
versus if it’s an organic video. Okay. What is, how does the rate, you can set your own rates for ads or that’s right. You can, you can negotiate with them and say, good. I know you were at 20%, your video is doing okay organically, but I really want to try it with ads. Okay. In order for me to spend my money on ads, I need you to go down to 5%.

35:40
And then they’ll send you what’s called a spark code, which gives you authority to run ads on their content. And then they get that automatic 5 % commission. So that’s how we can afford to fit in an advertising budget and a video. What is the typical affiliate rate? Typical is 15 to 20. That’s the expectation from the creator. Okay. That’s pretty high actually for physical product. I know. Yeah. I know.

36:05
All right, so walk, let’s continue on the process. You’re sending out, let’s say 200 based on the 7,000, you’re sending out 200 samples. What is your expected hit rate on that? 80 % will make a video, right? Yeah, 80 % will make a video. So then we’re at what 160 videos a week, right? And then we don’t expect any of those videos to go viral. We don’t, we don’t have that expectation whatsoever. Okay, we expect the videos to

36:34
potentially perform in an advertising campaign. And then what we do is we put we get the spark codes for all those videos, we negotiate the 5%. If a video is trash, we’re not going to offer anything that video is just going to sit on the page and just die. Okay. But if the video has any glimmer of hope, and we are in our thresholds are low, Steve, because we know we’ve been wrong. Okay, we have had times where the videos did not look great. And we were wrong.

37:02
We did not think that video was going to perform it and ended up being a $10,000 video in sales, right? You just don’t know. So unless the video is absolute garbage, the captions backwards, I didn’t even mention the brand. They’re in a cave. Can’t even see their face. We will offer them. We will negotiate a spark code 5 % commission and we will put it into what’s called GMV max ads. what are your thresholds? You said they’re low. What are your thresholds? It mentions the brand name.

37:31
it at least goes over the features and benefits of the product. Maybe it identifies the problem and solution, right? Okay, that’s a pretty low bar. It is like my baby had eczema. I rub this on the baby, the baby no longer has eczema. Okay, cool. Maybe the video quality isn’t great. But it looks super raw and it might work. You don’t care about the view count. No. Okay. Interesting. All right.

38:01
So here’s why we’re only going to put five, 10 bucks on that video, Steve. Okay. You see, we’re just going to see if the video can get a little bit of little action. One sale. see, okay. I would think that if it didn’t do well organically that it wouldn’t do on the video in the ad, but I guess that’s not the case. You’ve the case at all. Okay. Yeah. And that I thought the same thing. I had the exact same assumption as you. was like, let’s, this is how we did it at beginning. Let’s see which videos perform well and only run ads on those.

38:31
Okay. And guess what happened? We had nothing to run ads on. then, you know, it’s like, and then what do we do? Like, you know, and then, you know, we wasted all those samples. Like, why would you do that? That’s a lot of money the client paid to get samples in our hands. We got to do something. So we just went, screw it. Let’s put a little money on everything. And it worked. And GMV Max is a genius program. So here’s why. Just because it doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean that

39:01
The ad platform can’t turn it into a performing video. And here’s why the ad platform actually is good at identifying the avatar. It’s actually really good at finding the right people for the video. matches up the, the, the, the shopper to the video. So if the person has a thousand followers and you know, the video doesn’t have a crazy hook or something like that, just cause it only gets 300 videos doesn’t mean that the advertising console can’t find the right shopper for that video.

39:31
and get it into the right impressions. Okay. You only pay per click. That’s it. So you’re just, you’re just trying to get enough of the right impressions to the right avatar. And then once you start getting a few clicks and those clicks are, you know, buck 50 buck 25, okay. Way cheaper than Amazon 75 cents a lot of times. So yeah, you’d be surprised how well those perform on ads. can see tick tock knows who shops a lot on tick tock shop. they can easily just, okay. I get it. All right.

40:00
Yeah, it’s smart. Their AI is extremely intelligent. I think their advertising console is probably a couple years ahead of Amazon. Because I would think that this is one of my questions for you, actually. I would think going viral would be bad because then you run out of stock and everything. But I think this way, it seems like you’re getting consistent sales as opposed to waves of sales. Is that accurate? Yeah. And I wouldn’t say and it’s never bad to go viral. It’s awesome. Because at the end of the day, you know,

40:28
All the expenses are covered now, right? They’re like, great, that first four months was painful and now it’s all kind of paid back because I got a shit ton of organic sales and Amazon and I paid nothing almost for those sales. Right. But you’re right. It’s not controllable. It’s not something that I can scale. It’s not something I can promise or something I can predict. And I don’t like that. You know? Yeah. Well, what percentage of your videos have you seen go viral just in your experience?

40:55
I don’t even know at this point because we have 38 accounts with more videos being added every single day. But I can, I can count on one hand, the amount of videos I’ve gone viral. Wow. Okay. And most of your people are probably having 200 new videos added every single week. So, right. Very, very rare. Now here’s another reason why you’re less likely to go viral talking about a product than you will just making a funny video of, your dog farting in the background or something like that. Right. That’s, that’s different. You know, people are going to share that.

41:24
But people aren’t necessarily going to share a video that talks about how to cure your eczema to like all their friends. They might share it to one person that they know has eczema. You see the difference? So it’s situational. of those five that went viral, was there some crazy hook involved? One of them was a doctor that was talking about the dangers of parasites and it was terrifying. Okay.

41:51
Okay, so his hook was scaring the living crap out of you that your body is full of parasites. Okay. It worked. I mean, people were buying that product left and right thinking they were gonna drop dead with parasites. And he was a doctor. So he had some clout, and we were lucky to get him. Okay. Another video that went viral was the bathtub video. And it viral because it was really pretty. The lady turned off the light, she turned on all their little toys and the kid was in the bathtub and the whole bathroom lit up. It was awesome. So just it was kind of a spectacle. Okay. Yeah.

42:20
with the eggs in our product, which is our top selling product we have in our portfolio right now. They’ve never gone viral. It’s been $1 out $2 in $1 out $3 in the whole time. It’s been painful. Videos have performed well, meaning the ROAS has been four and half five cost per order has been reasonably good. But it’s been one of these brands where like we’ve had to work for every single every single impression. reason why I’m asking this

42:48
Is because can you provide guidelines for your people to go viral? Yeah. No, you can’t. And Jay, I’m glad you brought this up. Jay Jay talks about this. He’s like, don’t try to chase for reality. It’ll actually happen less often. If you try to, if you try to rinse and repeat and repeat, repeat, like find that formula, you’re actually going to end up having worse performing videos. You have to let people do what they’re going to do. And that magic quality is only in the

43:15
idea that that person had at that moment in time. Now you can give them basic parameters like this is what my product does. And you know, they have to make the proper claims and they have to not say things that they shouldn’t say. But outside of the basic here’s what it does. And, know, you know, just the basic description of the product. It’s up to that creator. And you want it to be up to that creator to find a exciting, fresh, inventive and personalized way to communicate it.

43:43
And then you have better chances. Cause I was asking Jay the same thing. I was like, man, my percentages are really low. It’s like your percentages are on par. was like, okay, wow. That almost makes me depressed and also makes me happy at the same time. It’s like, So give the creator total freedom. You tell them basically about your product and just let, let it run. Let it run. Okay. Yeah. Amazing. Because there are some, there are certain things that do matter. Like.

44:13
the watch time, there’s a six second watch time that TikTok looks for. So if your video never gets past that six second watch time, the odds of it going viral are zero. But if your video can hook people and keep them on the video for over six seconds, your odds are actually higher. So we do know that. We do know that that first six seconds really matters. So you don’t want to start your video of a, my name is Joe. And you know, let me tell you about my, you know, that’s too slow. Okay. There has to be a hook.

44:42
you know, the famous concept of the sure. Yeah. But we don’t want the hook to be the hook. We want it to be the hook that the person comes up with on their own. We want it to be organic. Got it. Yeah. I know a lot of people have gotten banned from TikTok shop. Like, can you just provide some like things not to do? At this point, it’s getting better. It’s actually getting a lot better. That was a lot of that was a problem with TikTok last year.

45:10
Everyone was getting banned left and right and they were getting banned for no good reason. They were getting banned for just trying to submit this the same document multiple times. It’s like, come on, man. Like, that’s the only document the guy has like don’t ban him because he tried three times he only has that document. That’s the invoice or that’s his LLC document for crying out loud. So it’s gotten a lot better. But I would say if you do have that problem, reach out to me and we have people on the inside. Most of time it’s stupid and we can we can get it fixed.

45:40
There was a people getting banned for false claims and whatnot too. Are there any guidelines? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s in the supplement world. More than anything, you know, there at the end of the day, there is something called the Federal Trade Commission. Well, I thought incentivize reviews as part of that too, but apparently not. Right. Well, it is. And we figured out how to make it compliant. So there’s some very nuanced rules to reviews. Okay. Reviews.

46:10
are actually totally legal. If they’re incentivized, they’re totally legal. As long as you claim that it was incentivized in the review. That’s how Amazon’s allowed to sell millions and millions of billions of dollars with the vine reviews. Right? Because it says free product. Got it. Okay. Okay. So I actually, I have a lawyer, an Amazon lawyer that I’ve been working with for years and I said, how do I sell reviews and not get in trouble? And he said, here’s what the FTC law say. You have to say this.

46:38
So we actually distilled it down to a very simple sentence. Every single review at the end of the review says, I received this product for free. Okay. And we’re clear. Now every marketplace has its own rules. Maybe Walmart doesn’t like it. I don’t know. I can’t speak for Walmart, but just know that you are 100 % in the clear with the FTC and you’re not committing any federal law breaking any federal laws by incentivizing reviews. As long as you have that disclaimer. I guess what I was trying to get at is what if your affiliate just starts

47:06
making wild claims about your product. happens? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the affiliates going to get banned or they’re going to get a strike. So there’s like a three strike system and your account’s going to get the same strike.

47:21
Even if it’s not your fault? Like you have no control over the affiliates, right? The only control you have is to make sure you send them the proper information in advance. what, what, uh, what Mary Ruth says is don’t say it and they have a list of sentences. Don’t say these things. But if they do, you still get in trouble. Yeah. If it gets, if they get them, if they get the strike, you get the strike. Okay. See, that does not seem fair because you have no control over your affiliates, right? I know.

47:49
So like if I wanted to take any of your brands down, you and I would just sign up as an affiliate and just start spouting nonsense. Oh, hell yeah. Right. Just right. You know, be like, this cures every form of cancer I’ve ever seen. And it’s just, it’s a cure all for all diseases. And yeah, for sure. It would be a terrible thing to do for a for a shop. They got to fix that. Right. I mean, you know, the reason why they do it is they do it so that the shop is very mindful and

48:18
If the shop didn’t get that mark, or whatever you call a flag or whatever on their, you know, on their point system, they have a 24 point system every shop. If they didn’t get it, the shop wouldn’t be constantly reminded to do a better job at getting the right product briefs out. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it’s up to the shop to properly educate the affiliate and go ahead. Yes, this is a weight loss product, but you are not allowed to say that it’s going to guarantee weight loss, or you’re not allowed to say the even the word weight loss.

48:48
So what you can say is pant sizes, I now fit in this dress, those kinds of things. People get the idea. I mean, this just makes negative, like you thought negative review bombing was bad on Amazon. This could take down entire accounts, right? This is much more severe. Yeah, but you’d have to have a ton of like, you know, if you wanted to be one of those guys, you’d have to take, you’d have to have like a ton of TikTok accounts and ask for a ton of samples. You know what mean? Probably true. But it…

49:15
It’s not as bad as you think like we we have a lot of supplement brands. And we also try to focus on products that are less risky in the portfolio. So like, like the the parasite cleanse I was telling you about, you know, it’s less risky because you know, but but we don’t say guaranteed to kill parasites. We don’t say stuff like that extreme. just say, parasites are really bad for you. Here’s some signs that you have parasites.

49:43
And here’s a great product that if you feel you do have them could help you with that. And that’s fine. But there are certain areas like weight loss.

49:55
just catch all medical claims that yeah, you gotta watch out for. So I wanna switch gears and talk about your services here. Do your clients typically use you for the launch phase and then feel like they can handle themselves in steady state or do they tend to stay with you in the long run? Cause you’re constantly getting new affiliates, new leads. Like what’s the life cycle like? They all stay. They all stay with me. Yeah. And I think it’s just because a lot of our sellers are a lot more mature. They’ve been on Amazon for a long time.

50:25
They have a DTC presence. A lot of them are working on getting in a lot of stores. So they’re already stretched pretty thin between like meta, um, um, Amazon, Chewy or whatever other marketplaces, Walmart now. So they’re usually just like, screw it. Like if you can just do your job and talk to me every two weeks, give me reports. I know where things are at. And in six months, it looks realistic that I can make a profit. Great.

50:53
That’s true. guess if it includes your fees, your retainer fees and everything and you’re making a profit. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe at some point, maybe it’s early, right? Maybe in six months or a year, some of my clients will be like, you know what, we’ve learned a lot. You guys got us to this place. Now we’re doing 150,000 a month. We want to take it in house and that’s going to happen. But right now, Tik Tok is such an anomaly. And another thing, Tik Tok is, is so much more work than Amazon that

51:22
Like think about on Amazon, you just list your product, send it into FBA, and then you run acts. Right. I might be oversimplifying it, but it’s really, mean, there’s more to it, but yeah, at a basic level. Yeah. At a basic level. Right. Yeah. On TikTok that does nothing for you. Like you have nothing with those things you without affiliates, you have nothing. And without affiliates, um, that’s where all the work is, is all those negotiations, all those conversations, the sampling, um, pulling those.

51:51
affiliates over to discord, getting them on, you know, running games with them, getting them keeping them engaged with the brand, building up that discord community. Come on, how many people want to spend time doing that? So what is expected from the client? I just want to get an idea of the workload for the client. Stay in stock. Okay. All right. So it’s just like selling an Amazon. Stay in stock. Don’t handle the rest. Stay in stock. Okay.

52:17
Yeah, stay in stock. And when we slack you a request for increased budgets, please respond, right? Just simple stuff like that. Like let us know. Let us know that, you know, we just need that cooperation on ad spend sampling. And if there’s any documentations we need, just be available. okay. What percentage of that 10k we were talking about earlier is towards product versus services? Mostly, mostly product and ad. So

52:46
Our retainers 4k, we’re very, we’re very open about that on our website. We literally have like a deck with our pricing. So I I’m very open about my pricing structure. Uh, we charge 4k. Um, so you’re looking at that additional 6k is in sampling and ads. Okay. Yeah. Unless your product is like an $800 air filter, then we have a different conversation to talk about. course. Of course. Yeah. Hey, so Ian, where can people

53:13
find you and get an idea of whether this will work for them. So I actually recommend that people go to the YouTube channel, watch, watch the Jay Hunter webinar first, because he breaks it down, I break it down, it’s the best place to get out, basically a long format pitch of if tick tock is for you. Okay, because we have a we have a 25 minute live q &a on there with a lot of sellers asking those tough questions. So watch that. It’s great. And if you still are interested after that, and you feel like you’re you kind of

53:42
you’re ready for that TikTok investment, financially speaking, and you want to outsource instead of doing it yourself, you can find me at bullseye sellers.com. Um, and if you book a call right on bullseye sellers.com, I will actually be invited to the call and I will meet you on that call. So then we can just talk about it and see if it’s a fit for you. And I will turn you away if I don’t think you’re ready or I don’t think your products, if it will be super honest with you. Yeah, I don’t want to fail. hate failing. Plus you don’t want to deal with someone who has

54:12
the wrong expectations, right? That’s even. Yeah. Like, yeah. How is it going to benefit me? if month three, we’re doing exactly what we said we’re going to do in month three, but you’re like tapping out because of the finances. It’s like, I don’t really want to play that game. I don’t want you as a client for three months. I want you as a client for years. So I’m in it. I’m in it for the long haul. Sounds good. Ian. Hey, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I learned a lot and I’m sure the audience did too. So thank you so much. You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. Hope you enjoyed this episode.

54:41
If your brand falls under the guidelines discussed in this episode, then you should definitely give TikTok Shop a try. For more information and resources, go to mywifequithejobe.com slash episode 595. Once again, the recordings for Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequithejobe.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.