Joining us today is Sean Travis. Sean is a 14-year veteran of the LA County Fire Department turned eCommerce entrepreneur and founder of Ecom for Heroes, a coaching and training company that helps ambitious entrepreneurs, many of them first responders, build profitable eCommerce brands. His programs have helped graduates average $131K in revenue within 18 months. Sean is also the creator of Calvin, an AI-powered eCommerce platform that takes someone from product idea to fully launched, branded, marketing-ready business in days instead of months. He lives in Southern California with his wife Lindsey, brand new son Jett, and their dog Nala.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the “Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast,” host Josh Hadley interviews Sean Travis, a former LA County firefighter turned e-commerce entrepreneur and founder of Ecom for Heroes. Sean discusses his journey, the challenges of scaling seven-figure brands, and the importance of differentiation in today’s market. He introduces “Calvin,” his AI-powered platform that streamlines product development, branding, and marketing. The episode features a walkthrough of Calvin’s capabilities, practical strategies for leveraging AI, and actionable advice for entrepreneurs aiming to build profitable, scalable e-commerce businesses efficiently and effectively.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Tools and Websites

Books

People

Videos

Concepts and Frameworks

Product Ideas

Analysis and Reports

Contact Information

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started my business in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

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Sean Travis 00:00:00  But if you want to do this grassroots or you want to do this with actual skill, because any fool can sell something for less. You need to be creative. And that’s where 1080 ten rule AI is coming in hard. Helping with that. So like I said, billions of data points. I can’t analyze that. So that’s what we’re super excited about is getting that piece of success.

MC 00:00:25  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:39  If you’re running a seven figure e-commerce brand today, you already know the biggest challenge isn’t just growth, it’s actually managing the increased complexity of the business. Well, what if AI could help manage all of that? Today’s guest has been building exactly that in his own brands. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures.

Josh Hadley 00:01:04  I bring you the unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael Gerber, author of The Myth. I’m giving You the real strategies, the systems, and the mindset to Help entrepreneurs like you scale from 7 to 8 and even nine figures and beyond. Today, I am super excited to welcome back onto the show. Sean Travis Sean is a 14 year veteran of the LA County Fire Department turned e-commerce entrepreneur and founder of Ecom for heroes, a coaching and training company that helps ambitious entrepreneurs, many of them first responders, build profitable e-commerce brands. His programs have helped graduates average 131 K in revenue within 18 months. Sean is also the creator of Khaldun, a AI powered e-commerce platform that takes someone from product idea to fully launched, branded, marketing ready business in days instead of months. He lives in Southern California with his wife, Lindsey. Their brand new son, jet, and their dog Nala. With that introduction, welcome back onto the show, Sean.

Sean Travis 00:02:03  Yeah. Let’s go. Welcome back. Thank you.

Josh Hadley 00:02:06  Sir. Good to have you back on. You dropped some massive value previously and then you followed up with some text as we’ve been following up since the last time we spoke. And you’re like, dude, I have, like, found some game changing AI stuff that I got to share with the audience. So I’m just as like, excited to have you on the show, as I’m sure our audience is to hear what you’ve been working on behind the scenes. It’s all AI focused and really like helping brands like ten X what they’re doing without having to hire more team members. So I’m super stoked.

Sean Travis 00:02:35  Yeah, absolutely. Dude. Me too. I could literally talk for hours on this. I do it in my community all the time. I just talk people’s ears off. What specifically do you want to hear first? And then I will riff. Let’s go. Yeah. Let’s go.

Josh Hadley 00:02:45  So I think the first thing I think is super important is like, give me the overall like sentiment from your community.

Josh Hadley 00:02:51  You’re talking to a lot of like entrepreneurs, those that are just starting, those that have already hit seven figures that want to scale beyond. So. Like, what do you hear? Like what’s working today? What’s not working? What are some of the pain points and what’s your overall sentiment on the market.

Sean Travis 00:03:05  Yeah okay. So when it comes to the market, I think in my opinion, what I’ve seen is the day and age of not differentiating without a clear unique value proposition is gone. So if you’re creating something that’s the same as the other guy that you know, China can pretty much just replicate and spit out on the Amazon, TikTok, whatever. Temu who cares? You’re dead. You’re dead in the water. Unless you have some unreal advertising marketing capability like Rasa olive oil, which all they did was put clean olive oil into plastic bottles. Impressive, by the way. But unless you have that skill, like you need to differentiate, obviously, like I’m sure most of you are rolling your eyes in the back of your head, but I cannot tell you how utterly important it is to realize what is the niche within the niche.

Sean Travis 00:03:47  So obviously sports and outdoors. But then what’s the niche within sports and outdoors that you want to operate in? But then most importantly, what is the UVB that no one is doing, what’s unique value proposition that no one is doing, and that little three dot pie chart, whatever you want to call it, is billions of data points that the entire market is already telling you, and you just need to farm it. You need to figure that out and then obviously go make it. But without that, I have barely seen success with clients with our own brands. Whatever, right? If it is clearly similar or the same as something that already exists, unless you got the six seven figure marketing budget, good luck. But if you want to do this grassroots, or you want to do this with actual skill because any fool can sell something for less. You need to be creative. And that’s where 1080 ten rule AI is coming in hard helping with that. So like I said, billions of data points.

Sean Travis 00:04:35  I can’t analyze that. So that’s what we’re super excited about is getting that piece of success. So it’s yeah that’s what we’re seeing.

Josh Hadley 00:04:45  I love that well I love that you touched on the 1080 ten rule. And this is something important. If this is the like the first time the listener is hearing this rule. This rule actually comes from like Steve Jobs and Apple, where again, what Steve Jobs was really good at is like the first 10% of a new product idea would be genuinely like his idea. It’s like this pie in the sky idea. I think we could go this direction. Okay, there’s 10%. Here’s the idea. Then 80% was then executed by his team, which is like fleshing out the idea, looking at the market opportunity. How would we actually bring this product to life? Really, just like fleshing out the details, then that would be coming back to him for the remaining 10%, for him to either give additional feedback, pivot into the new direction. But like ultimately he would finish it all up.

Josh Hadley 00:05:27  It’s not like Steve Jobs carried everything from point A to point Z all by himself. And so that 1080 ten principle is like the most important thing for entrepreneurs to understand is like, it’s all about leverage. Business is all about leverage, and you’re constantly trying to find the highest leverage points in your business to be able to scale. And this is definitely one of them, especially as it relates to product development.

Sean Travis 00:05:49  Yeah, I mean, that’s it’s spot on. You know, it’s it’s we have the ability to create right beyond anything of our imagination. The get the work done though. That’s the issue that I’d say most of us Peter out on. Or if you’re like me, you get everything to a certain percentage and then you see new shiny thing and you keep moving and you have the creative curse of ADHD or whatever you want to call it, that 80%. Now, though, that you still have to either deal with hunkering down in the trenches or hiring out a whole team to execute, right, just like Steve Jobs would.

Sean Travis 00:06:16  Right. And it’s phenomenal. We actually funny brought that up. I literally just saw the Steve Jobs movie The Apple one with Ashton Kutcher. Like two days ago again, like it’s a phenomenal watch. He was something special man. But AI now is majority of that 80% right. You still need human operators. You still need to. Garbage in, garbage out, treasure in, treasure out. So you need to make sure whatever that input is, is super valuable and gets you to where you want to go. But a lot of call it what it is monkey skills, you know, stuff that’s repeatable over and over and over again. Essentially, if there’s a formula or an algorithm, did you train someone to do it? And then it’s a repeatable task. AI is now doing that. Do you have a generic workflows? You have normal workflows, you have chat flows. You have whatever you want to do. But like AI is now doing that. So it’s all on how you train it.

Sean Travis 00:06:58  And so making sure you train it well yeah. So that’s what we’re leaning in hard. That’s what we’ve built a bunch. It is made our reporting mechanisms way easier, our advertising mechanisms way easier. And obviously our discovery and development mechanisms just fly off the shelf. So yeah, happy to dive in wherever.

Josh Hadley 00:07:13  Fantastic. Well, one thing on that note is I think that we’re going to dive into your like, tool that you created and like all the AI like agent stuff that you have going on there. But before we get to that, I want to have this conversation and kind of get your mind on this, because I know a lot of our listeners are thinking about this same thing right now, where it’s like there is so much noise in the AI space right now. I mean, it is every day, every week there’s some new development in AI. And like, you can’t help but not just feel behind no matter what you do. I think even the best in the business right now, they still feel like they’re behind, like there’s something new changing so quick.

Josh Hadley 00:07:49  Now here’s what I get from a lot of people. It’s like. Am I supposed to spend the majority of my time creating a bunch of claw bots and vibe coding stuff right now? Or like, where should I be spending my time? Because honestly, like, you could get lost in the rabbit hole of AI and like, literally spend every waking moment in like just creating stuff and then stuff will work, stuff will break. You have to patch stuff and things like that. So I’m almost seeing it as brand owners need to identify, like, are you a SaaS business or are you actually a brand owner? Because I think, like, we’re going to cross a fine line. I think in the coming months and year where some tools, yes, you could vibe code them. Yes, you could build your own like AI tracking software tool, which could be helpful, but you could get that same thing for $50 a month as a software service. Right? And arguably, I’m going to say there are times where I’m personally going to choose the $50 a month software service to go execute that for me, even though I, I know I could go vibe code it myself.

Josh Hadley 00:08:52  But the hassle of, well, what happens when the script’s not functioning properly, or the API connection is broke, or the report that was getting sent in is no longer the same formatting. So then I have to go change the back end. That’s the type of stuff that, like software companies have to deal with on a regular basis. So I think there’s definitely like things that are worth your time and investing into AI agents and things like that. And then there’s other times where I’m just going to pick this off the shelf, like $50 a month subscription because like, it’s I don’t even have any mental load over this. I’ll let them deal with all the technical stuff that comes with it. Give me your take on that, Sean, because I know you’re super into the weeds of AI. I’m personally not super into the weeds of AI. You would nerd out on it. I’m not. So much. So give me your perspective on that.

Sean Travis 00:09:36  Ooh. All right, now we’re talking about how we work the achievement robot system.

Sean Travis 00:09:40  So actually I’ll quote my business coach. So Dan Martell, if you guys haven’t been familiar with him. Please. Please go follow him. So. Spoiler alert. That was one of the answers to my questions at the end. But Dan Martell, just go follow him. Like he’ll amp you up. He’ll get you fit. He’ll remind you what a good family life looks like and how to make hundreds of millions of dollars. Just do it. That being said, that might be the most valuable piece of advice I just gave on this whole podcast. Next is is it going to make you money? So what pain point are you solving? Yeah, we can all build super cool tools by telling Madness or Cloud Code, or clod or ChatGPT or grok or perplexity or Perplexity, computer or Cloud bot or Open Claw or what? Dude, we go forever. Why? Like one? What pain point is it solving in your life? So the tool I built, Calvin, I just wanted to build it for myself because I was doing all these repeated tasks and training people to do it.

Sean Travis 00:10:25  There was all these broken systems just because I wanted to see it one way and, you know, it wasn’t being understood and it was always 80% as good as I wanted it, etc. so I built it for myself. That was the initial outcome because it solved the pain point. Like, I need this stuff to be elite best in class and I don’t have all the time of the day, so I was hiring people to do it. And maybe I’m not the best leader in educating, but whatever it was, the output wasn’t always there. And so finally I just built the tool, and now the people that I hired can use the tool and execute. But then two isn’t going to make you money. Like, yes, we can all build better systems, but like, how is that? And this is just basic business 101. If every action you do isn’t calculated to the dollar it returns, then you don’t know your numbers and thus you don’t know your business. Do you know what each of your Vas or your employees are worth? You like how much revenue and how much profit do they pull in? If you don’t know that, go find out right now.

Sean Travis 00:11:15  Go to hello, Frank. Sign up. Do that thing. It’ll tell you this process that figuring out what types of products to sell, how to build them, how to scale them, how to grow them, how to create content and websites and CRMs like, if I don’t know what that process is worth to me, then what am I doing? But that whole process is worth me a valuable chunk, like six plus figures a month that is worth more than me building it. So that’s step one is why? Why would I build it myself versus a software? Is step two is this. And I’ve gone through this right. One of the things that is classic is everyone wants a chatbot on their website, whether you’re selling bamboo toothbrushes or you’re, you know, teaching people how to jump higher or whatever it is you want some type of AI chatbot that has your knowledge base to answer questions 24 over seven to your customers, to your users, to your whatever. I went through the most frustrating process for about 8 or 9 months, and that’s when my business coach was like, you need to stop.

Sean Travis 00:12:06  And I was like, what do you mean? And he goes, you’re going down the wrong road. And so this was the biggest question I had for him. And this is just your execution framework is how many times do you keep pushing on something, iterating and pushing, iterating and pushing until there’s and this is this is a confusion I’ve always had as a doer is how do I know this isn’t the moment? I just need to go one step more or I need to change the path mode, right? We’ve always we’ve all hit that wall. If you’ve ever tried to do anything hard in your life, you know you’ve hit that wall. It’s like, so how do I know? It’s like, maybe I just need to put a little bit more effort in, and then you’re so committed and you’re like, well, maybe just a little bit more. How do we know we’re not going down the wrong rabbit hole? Right? Time to climb back out and jump into the next one. And so this is the rule he gave me, is you get three hardcore 100% effort iterations.

Sean Travis 00:12:49  That’s it. You get three. My man. If you didn’t figure it out in that third, you are moving on. Someone else might have been able to, but if you did not get out and go do something else because that is not for you. So when it came to building out versus using softwares, I tried three different softwares for the chatbot specifically. So majority of what we operate on our websites is now a chatbot that I had to build because everything that chatbots had and all the chatbot softwares, you know, you got close bot, you got what? I’m not going to name softwares. There’s a bunch, there’s so many. But anyways, they’re all decision trees. They’re all like, if this, then that, if this, then that, if this then that. And so in order to program, I’m given knowledge base for that AI in that chatbot to then access. And based off that decision tree, you have to essentially come up with every possible decision tree that someone might walk you through in a conversation.

Sean Travis 00:13:36  Now, if it’s a sales conversation or it’s a client success conversation or a customer service conversation, it’s typically a normal flow that you’re going to guide, right? You, as the professional, are going to guide that person in a conversation. If any of you are in sales or have ever done sales, you obviously know you guide the combo. As soon as the you know attendee is guiding the conversation, you lost the power. You lost the sale. Right? That’s the whole thing. So yes, I understand for most basic JV style use cases, you can use those if then decision tree chatbots. But what if we want something that’s analytical? What if we want something that thinks outside the box? What if we want something that I don’t want to spend every day or every other week, you know, sitting in there trying to figure out the new decision tree and going back and forth to my MLM and asking, oh no, is this a new decision tree that I need to program? Dude, it was.

Sean Travis 00:14:20  I was literally pulling my hair out of my head, and then above that it would hallucinate and it would start saying weird things like, I remember this conversation. Some guys like, hey man, you know, did you for real, like work for the fire service. And you know, I retired in 2022. I worked for L.A. County and loved the job promoted through the ranks was about to make captain before retiring. All the stuff right. The chap off, for whatever reason, hit the wrong decision tree and started hallucinating, saying that I was some special service member in Seattle and I’m like, what is happening right now? So that being said, I’m sure you guys have seen some fun hallucinations. You know, I even had like a content generation tool. You know, I was working through creating different product style images for a product and on like the seventh iteration, it gave me a portrait of some random dude like. And then the next one was a bird on a twig, like so.

Sean Travis 00:15:03  Dude, it will hallucinate. So my point is, is it answering the pain point? And does that pain point make you money? Well that’s all. Yeah, and it’s all in the photo. If you need to know what each pain point is worth to you.

Josh Hadley 00:15:11  So yeah, I think that’s a really good mindset shift. Especially like I really love like the three efforts of like 100%. Right. My favorite analogy is or the image that you see is the guy who’s like digging for gold. And he’s like one pick more away from like hitting the diamonds and the gold, but then like, turns around and walks away. Right. Because but he never knew he was like just right there. And I think like that’s always like for entrepreneurs. You’re like, oh, but it might just be my next attempt, my next attempt, my next attempt. Entrepreneurs are very optimistic, but I love that like mindset, that framework to say like three, 100% effort. And if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit and you move on.

Josh Hadley 00:15:48  I definitely have seen that in my own business, where the first time we tried to get on TikTok shop like it was a complete failure, right? And we worked with an agency on the flip side. Like then I took it over and gave it my best effort. And even like in hindsight, I look at my best effort and I laugh at it today because I’m like, oh man, that was very janky at the time. But it worked and it worked and it started to get us some momentum. And then we just kept doubling down and refining the process and getting better and better over times. And then there’s also been other times where back in, I think like the 2017 to 2020 era, I wanted to get on Shopify and I think we tried probably like probably ten different times of like trying to figure out Shopify, trying to scale Shopify. And it’s like failure after failure after failure after failure after failure. However, lo and behold, after we find success on TikTok shop, we then span up because we knew what the creative offers were, what people were attracted to.

Josh Hadley 00:16:42  Sure enough, on the 11th time and you know, five years later, Shopify starts working for us. And so I think that back then I should have probably, like stopped after the third attempt at Shopify and gone back to Amazon would have saved me a lot more money and then come back to Shopify when there is a new thing that has changed, where it gives you a new perspective. So anyways, I just love that like mindset shift and I think it’s super applicable and especially in the world of AI that we’re diving into here. It’s like find the things that like are going to give you the most leverage and generate revenue in your business. So with that being said, I’m super excited to dive into your tool, Sean. Like, let’s go ahead if you want to share your screen. So those of you listening to the podcast, make sure you come check us out on YouTube, because Sean’s going to basically walk us through the AI tool that he has built to really like all the softwares that we’re all used to using, which is helium ten, the Jungle Scouts, the data dives of the world.

Josh Hadley 00:17:36  Those are all great. But as Sean just mentioned, like I tried using all of these things and it still wasn’t giving me the output that I wanted. So he built his own. He has a crazy number of API connections in here. I’ll let him explain even more into this. But what is this new future of product development and new product opportunity look like in the age of AI? Sean.

Sean Travis 00:17:56  Oh, right. Well, in my opinion, it looks like Calvin. So let me go ahead and share my screen here. Welcome to Calvin AI. So this is the software we built. Now let’s go through the pain points I am teaching all the time. I obviously run a few of my own brands with my wife and I. We’ve had great success. It’s allowed me to retire from a very well-paid fire service job that I absolutely loved. And if you know LA, Southern California, you know, we get paid very well. We’re the best trained firemen in the world. So paramedics you saw like you call 901 here.

Sean Travis 00:18:26  Same people show up. It doesn’t matter what it’s for because they’re set to handle it all. So that being said, we’ve had a lot of success. Thus we have a lot of formulaic pieces SOPs, SLAs, like all the good stuff. If I showed you my database of what to do, when to do it, how to do it, it’s pretty expensive, extensive and expensive, but extensive, right? You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of training have gone into figuring that out. It’s essentially boiled down to, though, when we’re building a brand from scratch, which we teach people how to do a lot of them, first responders, obviously, you know, I’m best fit to teach the person that I used to be. So a lot of them firemen, cops, you know, medics, nurses, doctors, but not all right. If you are an ambitious individual with same core values of integrity and teamwork, and you know that sense of grit and delayed gratification, I can get stuff done, but I can do it over a year or two years.

Sean Travis 00:19:14  You know, this is the type of business that is for you. Nothing about this is to get rich quick, which you know, right? Like do not get into e-commerce. If whether it’s Amazon or DTC or any of it, if you’re trying to make money in the next 3 to 6 months, like, nope, you are going to be pouring out. Just know that. But just like building any business, it’s a upside down parabola. It’s flat line that hockey stick. But you need the flat line before you get to the vertical, right? You need to have that flat line. So what does that flat line look like. So here the pain points that we were wanting to solve is the five phases are discover. So what am I going to sell. And let me go ahead and open this up here. So a new analysis we have three different modes to discover is one. Fresh up I don’t know anything or I’m building a brand new brand or I already have two very successful brands.

Sean Travis 00:20:00  They’re just on autopilot. And you know, my partners are running them and I want to build something else. Go ahead and discover, figure that out. Give me a product category. Target cost of goods, Cogs, target sale price. What you think? Just go with it, see what happens. Any additional constraints? And I know this window is a little small. You can put tons of stuff into it. So like for example, one of the products that I wanted to search was what’s something for burned out shift workers, blue collar workers that don’t have enough time to actually get real workouts in the working 12 hour beat shifts. They get home, they’re super tired. They go to sleep, they wake up, they do it all over again. Right? And the whole holistic wellness, you know, everyone like, needs to do like cold showers and saunas. And believe me, I know I used to teach that stuff, so. Right. You know, your inversion stretching and your breath work and these guys are like, dude, I’m freaking smelting iron.

Sean Travis 00:20:44  Like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, I don’t have time for all this. I literally put that in here. And it created me a whole supplement stack with formulations, a brand name, all this stuff called shift Force, all the like. Unbelievable. So you can be as specific as you want in the constraints, then go ahead and run the discovery. Now, full disclosure this is where the power comes in. A discovery will take anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes of analysis. So be patient. It’ll show you the flywheels, all that stuff going on, but it is pinging 178 different APIs. You have 11 Llms working in tandem, hitting every single marketplace as if it’s a McKinsey marketplace analysis team. I mean, this process right here is the same thing that used to take us 3 to 4 weeks with seven team members using the analytic tools like Jungle Scout, helium ten, Data Dive and SEMrush for Google and TikTok trends and meta ad library. And honestly, you think it we probably already thought of it and attached it here.

Sean Travis 00:21:39  So you were getting the same level of keywords as any of the big dogs from Amazon. You’re also getting Walmart keywords, you’re getting Etsy keywords, you’re getting obviously anything that is SEO or Geo, which is another AI search because everyone’s finding their stuff through ChatGPT now, not Google, but you are getting all those heavily searched for keywords, analytics, etc. and then it’s analyzing. But on top of that, it’s also analyzing the demographics. Because as we know with TikTok, shop, Instagram, anything that’s social forward, Facebook, they don’t give it what you’re searching for in keywords. They care about who you are. That’s why your algorithms are so tested to either piss you off or get you, you know, super excited about something. That’s why if you lean just a smidge right or a smidge left politically, that’s all you get because they are trying to figure out who you are and they just give you more of it. So in the product or service based business, we want to attach ourselves to that, right? We want to figure out if those algorithms already know who we are.

Sean Travis 00:22:29  We should be pulling that in. So who’s our key demographic and what product are they already searching for? And then most importantly, how do we make it better? How do we make it better than something that already exists out there? Right. You don’t need to be the first computer. Apple wasn’t. You don’t need to be the first phone. Apple wasn’t, but they made that better. So how do we fall in line? Just like Steve Jobs. We’ll keep him as a theme of the the talk show, right? How do you do that? How do you make that thing better? And this is what we’re harping on. This is what it’s 180 page thesis. It’s I think it’s 72 different prompts. So it’s multiple prompts going back and forth, all iterating and figuring that out just to give you a possible product discovery. Then let’s say you already have a product idea which a lot of us already operate in this space, right? Especially with the ecomm breakthrough, you know, audience, you know, majority of us are already seven figure sellers.

Sean Travis 00:23:17  Like, dude, I already got this. I already have, but I got this new idea. I got the new shiny thing, and I’ve been seeing it. An example of this. When this would have been super useful, I would have been. One of my first very successful products was a wooden cocktail smoker. That was the first product I ever sold 120,000 in 1 day. Unreal. So 120 K out the window. Amazon I thought my app broke. It was in 2021. I literally like were about boarding a flight. And you know in the holiday season I was and I turned to my wife. I was like, is this broken? Like it was one of our big first holy cow moments. This is unreal. Dude, when something goes viral, it booms. So that would have been an example of what to put here. Now, at the time 2021, there was no wooden cocktail smokers. Now, for reference, you know, I’m not a big drinker. And if you guys have never seen these things, they’re actually really cool.

Sean Travis 00:24:04  So it’s this wooden piece that you put on top of a cocktail. It’s like a lid. And then in it it’s got a bevel or a chimney or something where you put wood chips into it, and the bottom of the piece that’s sitting on top of the cocktail has little aeration holes, and then you have a little filter mesh metal filter that you’ll put on top so you don’t get blowback when you torch the actual wood chips. Then you put a lid on top of it. So those wood chips now are smoking through the aeration holes and actually smoking the drink. It makes whiskey, tequila, mezcal like pick your poison taste really cool and really good. And it’s a showstopper. And it’s awesome for the table and restaurants. High end steak restaurants are using them all over the place now, like it is a cool freaking product. So that didn’t really exist, though. We saw it at some restaurant randomly and hadn’t seen it online, and so at the time all that existed were like, you know, electric smokers or, you know, the weird stuff that would happen behind the bar or whatever.

Sean Travis 00:24:57  But this piece didn’t really exist yet. It was very new. It was very up and coming. That would have been something I could have put here. So I would put it in the product name, you know, something like cocktail smoker, product URL if there is one optional and then product images, you can go ahead and upload if you want. If you had any of them take a iPhone shot, you know, take a phone shot of your product so they can verify, right? Remember, AI can actually see what’s in your photo product category and niche. In that case I would put, you know, cocktail accessories or something like that. And then target cogs, target sale price, additional constraints. Right. Anything I want. Go ahead and vet it again. Say embedding analysis is going to happen. It’s gonna be a little quicker than that 15 to 20 minute process, because now we’re already pinpointed on the needle in the haystack. And we just need to see the market around it.

Sean Travis 00:25:36  But same analysis, right? Is it being searched for or is there’s demographics. Who wants it? How often are they searching for it? Amazon APIs, Walmart, meta, TikTok, etc. etc. etc. it’s all attached, right? These analyzes are analyzes are not cheap right. So you click this. It’s not a couple censuses. It’s actually pretty expensive which is why the platform is priced as it is. But then let’s say you’re Josh Hadley and you have an amazing brand already. I want to expand this, and I don’t know what new product to add to my brand. Let’s say it is time for that because in realistic world, in order for us to take an eight figure brand to a nine figure brand, what do we have to do?

Josh Hadley 00:26:11  Josh, we have to scale. We have to launch more products.

Sean Travis 00:26:14  Exactly how do I know if it’s the right choice? How do I know if it’s tangential? How do I know if it’s. Is this pulling away from my brand, or is this adding to my brand? Is this something that’s going to cross promote to my already already customers? Right.

Sean Travis 00:26:25  Is it if I’m buying pet food mats, I’m probably going to need a pet food bowl and a pet food bowl stand. And what comes next is maybe pet food, and then maybe pet food treats and then right, what comes next? But I don’t know that. That’s just my gut. I want billions of data points. I want multiple PhD level analysts telling me at a sixth grade level. So I know what they’re saying, what to build. Right? The market is already there. The billions of data points are already there. But I don’t have, in my feeble little human mind the capacity to analyze all that and go and have the time to search on the internet, all that stuff. So we built that. So in this case.

Josh Hadley 00:26:59  On that note, Sean, I love that. By the way, one thing I would add to that, just for our listeners, is one of the best things to do. If you’re considering, like what’s the next new product to launch. Like it truly is like honing in on who your customer avatar is, and one product is going to solve one pain point, which is then going to lead to another pain point, right? Just because you have like the silicone mat for the dog and his water dish.

Josh Hadley 00:27:23  Right? Well, okay. Well the dog drank, but now the dog’s hungry. And so now the dog needs something for, you know, how is he getting fed? Is it an automated feeder or things like that? Well, once the dog is then fed, the dog needs to exercise it. So what does the dog need to exercise? The dog needs to entertain him. Like you can go on and on and on. I just think that that’s the most important thing for entrepreneurs to understand is like, all you’re trying to do is think of who is my customer and how do I solve pain points. And every product you launch should be like, you should see it as this this like customer journey or life cycle of like I solve this, then they’re going to experience this pain point, then I solve that, then my next product solves this pain point. So again, I think if you use that framework and dump that type of stuff into this, like now I’m actually really excited to see like what it’s going to come out if if I’ve clearly articulated to this AI who my customer avatar is, my current products that solve current pain points, but I’m not even sure what the next pain points might even be.

Sean Travis 00:28:23  Yes. Yep, you are spot on. I think a crude quote from my business coach was don’t sell multivitamins, sell painkillers. And what do you meant by that? Is like you’re not masking something or preventative like you need to be actually solving pain points. Like now you can go any existential, you know, painkiller ethics. But the point is, is right. If you are not solving the pain point, you’re not solving the problem. You’re actually not helping someone out. Like so. Absolutely. Spot on. We need solutions, right? Whether it’s time, money, or both, we need solutions. Can you get it to me quicker or cheaper or more effectively, please? That’s what we’re always trying to optimize. That’s how the human mind works constantly solution oriented. So if you’re connecting people at that level, you’re going to connect with them. So spot on. Yeah. So enter in here for expand brand. You would enter in everything about your brand images of current products. You know your brand URL, your existing products one per line please, but go ahead and just enter them all in category.

Sean Travis 00:29:12  Niche. Target cogs and sale price range of what you’re looking for in. Then additional constraints and go ahead and run that expansion analysis. All right. Now that we have the three types of what to discover what comes next. So we’ll go ahead and we will look into an analysis here. So this is what your analysis is going to look like. So this was an example of something for like I was talking about this is different from the shift force like hydration thing that you know when I input for shift workers that don’t have time for, you know, workouts and gathering essentially their nervous system is way too dysregulated. Why do I know that? Because that was me. I was literally working 4 to 5, 24 hour shifts a week for 14 years. I did not know what rest and digest actually felt like. Like literally you feel jet like just permanently. So, you know, if you ever flown 12 hours and just feel that like horrid jet lag that was like forever. It’s miserable. So how do we combat that? Right.

Sean Travis 00:30:01  We can’t get our sleep back. So what do we do? So this was another one that it came out with. I gave it those constraints. I gave it. You can see premium supplements in the category cost of goods $5 or less. Sale price of 35 bucks. This is what the analysis looked like. So it literally comes up with a brand name for me. Now obviously check if this is trademarked, already in use or already in market, but it comes up with what it could find. So if it’s not heavily already marketed, it will tell you this brand name. Vagal tone. Psycho. Biotic. Symbiotic. Complex. What does that all mean? What that means is essentially, you have the vagus nerve. Not to get too nerdy here, but that is what essentially controls your fight or flight or your rest and digest is are you ready to go or are you actually resting, repairing? Are you excited? Or are you in a stressful state or are you in a relaxed state? Obviously, we need to be in both throughout the day.

Sean Travis 00:30:52  However, with phone stimulation, social media, news, etc. obviously we’re always on our computers, we’re always working, we’re always expected to be working, or you might just have a really stressful life and not understand how to ground and, you know, regulate your emotions. You’re probably in a fight or flight state all the time. We need to be in that relaxed parasympathetic state. Multiple times a day, especially at night, because that is the only area where our brain creates memories and our body repairs at a cellular level. So if we are not entering into that, if we’re not doing breathwork and relaxing and chilling that f out and going for nature walks or whatever, right? Do things that make you human. Remember you’re a human being, not a human doing. So be human. So if you’re not doing those things, it puts you in the parasympathetic. Dude, you are literally killing yourself slowly. It is a slow death of a thousand cuts. And do not do that. It takes minimum stuff.

Sean Travis 00:31:38  You just have to transition out of that fight or flight. State that stress state into that relaxed state. Plus, here’s the fun part is all solutions are made in your brain, in that relaxed state. And all creativity is made in your brain in that relaxed state. So if you want to come creatively, to problem solve, to build to, etc., you need to consciously enter into that. So this was the solution that Calvin gave us is it gave us a strong opportunity. Seven and a half out of ten. So what is this? A premium psycho biotic symbiotic complex specifically. Specifically formulated for vagus nerve activation via the gut brain axis fills a clear positioning gap, by the way. Did you know that majority of your serotonin is produced in your gut? You’re one of your feel good endorphins. Hormones is produced in your gut. So if you have a leaky gut, a horrible gut microbiome, a inconsistent gut, you know, tons of acid reflux. You’re not just messing with your stomach, bro.

Sean Travis 00:32:31  You’re messing with your brain. So we got to fix that gut brain access here. It says no Amazon product currently claims this niche explicitly. The main risk is unproven keyword demand. Since vagus nerve probiotic is nascent as a search term. Now that being said, that’s actually a blue ocean. So back to my wooden cocktail smoker. That wasn’t a key word yet because it didn’t exist. So welcome to a blue ocean. You have supplements that are already on the market about regulating your nervous system. This one’s the next level up. People are already searching for your tangential. What do you need to do now to get them to your current level, requiring social first demand generation? So obviously we need to educate our customers. That’s anytime you create a UDP you need to educate. We typically do that UGC content or user generated content. TikTok shop on your meta ads. Also Amazon with your video ads or your product image. Better be freaking clear what it is and obviously you’re listening. There should be no question this product is best suited for a brand builder willing to educate the market via TikTok, Instagram content, and DTC subscriptions, rather than relying purely on Amazon search volume.

Sean Travis 00:33:30  I love it, it actually gave you that recommendation. So not only how to launch, but where to launch. And it gives you a best signal, key risk, top action. And then here’s one of my favorite parts. It gives you actual visual product mockups. Because what’s the missing piece? Everything I’ve talked about is someone still needs to go build this. Someone in a factory still needs to put this stuff together. So when you connect with your suppliers, which we have here, the analysis gives you this, by the way, the templates to connect, who to connect to, where to reach out. It’s already done that research, remember? You got to give them visuals. You got to give them explanations. You got to give them. This is what I want. This is the formulation I want currently in a supplement. But obviously, you know, if it was anything else it would give them specifically that. But we’re not all just supplements here. But it will give you it’ll give you all that stuff to get to your product manager or your supplier or your manufacturer.

Sean Travis 00:34:18  And then on top of that, if you want to do any pre-launch campaigns before your product is actually built, you need this image. You need these visuals. You need lifestyle images. You need visuals. You need packaging. You need size reference, which will go ahead and regenerate here every now and then. Right. There’s an error in the API connection. Just go ahead and click regenerate. And then if you want another take you just go ahead and click get Another take. So you need these images to build out your website, build out your content, build out all that visual content assets, which fun fact is all part of Calvin. But we’ll get there. Then you get your in-depth structured analysis. And I won’t go through this in detail because obviously this is a very in-depth report, PhD level sixth grade understanding. So Product name and overview. Product Viability Score right now gives it a seven and a half out of ten. And why? Market opportunity summary. Competitive landscape differentiation strategy obviously the secret sauce.

Sean Travis 00:35:08  So essentially right now all we’ve answered is is this market worth going after. And then if so how do we stand out? Manufacturing options, like I was saying is who do we reach out to? It already found the best. A lot of them are domestic here in the United States, which is awesome. If you’re in the supplement world, you know that it’s one of the few product categories that you can almost guarantee to have a domestic supplier. Fun fact though most of them source their stuff internationally, so don’t be, you know, shooting yourself in the foot. If you have a Chinese supplier with supplements, it’s the same stuff. That’s probably where your American supplier is getting it from. Right. There’s no coffee made in America, so there’s no such thing as made in USA coffee. Same thing with most of the ingredients. So it gives you all your tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers. And then at the bottom you got your supplier cards. Where to reach them. If you want Alibaba you can copy the outreach here.

Sean Travis 00:35:52  So what message should I send to them. So if I click view on Alibaba it’ll take me to the Alibaba. In the search query I go ahead and click on their profile. I go ahead and copy the outreach copy, paste in the message. We’re off and running and then continue down. What is the profitability and ROI projection look like for this product then. All right. We’re looking at Cogs. We’re looking at percentage of revenue referral fee FBA fulfillment fee PPC test total cost, net profit per unit. So that’s Amazon specific. But it also does DTC specific. And then it does totality specific. You know, even breaks down into what phases you should launch and where first year totals based scenario payback period ROI. Right. All the KPIs that you need to know. Is this worth going into? How much should I look to invest? How long until I get that back? What am I looking at after, you know, a year or two years, three years, etc. then your risk risk assessment mitigation, your brand building potential and your strategic recommendation.

Sean Travis 00:36:38  And then lastly your action plan, what to do, when to do it, how to do it. And then on top of that, if any of that is unclear, you got down here, like I was saying earlier, a chatbot and this chatbot here is connected to the entire analysis and obviously everything else that Calvin does. So go ahead and ask it all you want to know about the report, because guess what? This is a lot of text. And then if he wants, you can go ahead and launch this product. Now what that does is it locks it into your profile. So what we’ve created is everyone who’s doing discovery analysis may just run an analysis. And then that amazing product may not get launched. So this product right here, this vagal tone product, no one’s launched it which is why I was able to bring it up. So if after 14 days you have it launch this product, essentially locked it to your profile, it’s going to get released to the masses. So there’s a scrolling window at the login page so they might be able to capture it.

Sean Travis 00:37:23  You’ll be notified don’t worry because that obviously you pay to have that analysis done, you’ll be notified, hey, your product is about to be released, but you can also capture other people’s products because other people have different perspectives on how to search for stuff, how to research stuff, etc. of things you may like, may want to iterate off of and all that. That was the in-depth piece, because the rest is. Now that I know what to sell, I’ve iterated with my chatbot and you can rerun this analysis, by the way. So at the very top, let’s say I came up with some ideas with the chatbot, I go ahead and rerun the analysis, I rerun it with the updates. I literally give it the updates that the chatbot told me, and I rerun it to see if I can get a better score than seven and a half out of ten. I’d love a ten out of ten, right? So let’s make sure we hit that. Let’s make sure we know what to do and how to do it and where to do it.

Sean Travis 00:38:01  But what comes next? Let’s say now I’ve reached out to product manufacturer. I have this thing going. What now? Well, that’s what we’ve built in the build phase. You get what’s called a brand vault, where you build out your brand’s identity, the names, the voice, the colors, the logos of the image. You keep reiterating on that stuff, you just get another take or tell it how to iterate. Tell it. You can tell the software, you know, I like this, keep this, don’t do that, etc. then lock it in. Now that you’ve locked it in, you now have a brand board generator and a brand voice settings that will exist across the platform for the rest of the content. For the rest of what we’re building. Next comes create. So create is Content Calendar one off Composer Video Studio, which is available, it says here available on Growth plan. But that’s just because it’s a test account that I’m in. Landing pages and marketplace listings. Holy cow.

Sean Travis 00:38:45  So we have APIs connected to all of the best. And I mean that. And if something comes out better then we connect it to that and replace it. All of the best content generation, all the best image generation, all the best video generation. We have 17 different image and video content generation models that are all least connected here. And we’re adding more, but it’s based on use case, right? So like Nano Banana two right now is the best for real. Nice realistic but putting text on photos. So if you’re not using the latest from Nano Banana two, please go use that for text on photos because we’ve all seen the gibberish video composer. Depends, right? You might like C dream, you might like Vo 3.1 depends on what kind of video right. So we’ve attached per use case. So you’re going to create all this. You get your content calendar. Why. Because you’re going to start posting the social media. And you’re going to do one off composers because you’re going to want to post different ads.

Sean Travis 00:39:31  You want to, you know, get this out to the world, whether it’s your Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc. it’s all generated here based off the product and brand you just built. Or if you input your brand and you input your already existing brand, it’s going to start creating stuff or you’ve already input your product that you already have. It’s going to start creating stuff, iterate with it, create stuff. Now you have one month, two month, three month, etc. social media posts and ads and then of course your marketplace listings. My Amazon listing. My Walmart listing, my TikTok shop listing, my Etsy listing, my you name it listing. We need those builds and each one of those has specific criteria, so we want to build to that level. Well guess what. All of it’s formulaic. So we just put it in here. And we made sure the prompts for all of it are the best of the best best in class. And then you got launch phase. So connect your social accounts, which we’re working on right now.

Sean Travis 00:40:17  Right now it’s going to be just save your photos and videos and then you attach them into your own social accounts. I actually recommend doing that because the platforms know when you’re using software to post. So doing in platform posting is actually the best way. So even if you connect your social account to Calvin and Auto Post for you, which we’re going to have that feature, actually recommend not even doing that. Still have you or VA save it and then actually upload it in platform? The platform notes, right? Don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Then a blog engine. What’s the blog engine for store operations is what comes next is we are actually building out your website, your CRM, your entire platform is going to be built out. So now your website will be built out on a CRM with your email campaigns, SMS campaigns, all branded to that brand that you just created or already had. Your ads will be already be getting created here, and there will be all auto populating into your CRM so you can connect your ad accounts and just have them start auto posting or auto creating and auto iterating.

Sean Travis 00:41:16  All of that is in one stop. So in totality, this is what Calvin does. And it’s only going to keep getting better. But we’ve taken the answer of these are all the five phases that used to take a lot of time for us, for our clients, for our own brands. And now I have essentially not automated but done the 1080 ten with each of these pieces. And I want you to have that at your hands and at your feet as well. And if there is a the most elite LM or the most elite LM model, or the most elite content generation model. It is the one attached here, believe me. And if one becomes the better, we then swap them out. Because at the end of the day, I’m doing this for me and my own and I only want the most, the best, the most elite. I don’t settle for less. So that’s what you guys will be getting by using this stuff and onward!

Josh Hadley 00:42:02  Fantastic! Sean. Love the walkthrough. Definitely moving into a whole new phase of business with the AI revolution going on right now.

Josh Hadley 00:42:09  So Sean, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. Number one, make sure that you are implementing the 1080 ten principle into your business. That is probably one of the first, most basic steps that an entrepreneur can make is understanding that you need leverage in your business to create revenue. And so, number one, you should be the idea guy coming up with the first 10%. Give it to a team with process or AI to then carry it the remaining 80%. And just like what you showed us today with Khaldun, like it’s not. It’s there. But then you still need that remaining 10% of your like special sauce that you add on that only you as an entrepreneur have, that you can see a unique angle into the market, or how are you going to differentiate it? What polishing do you bring to the idea and process? So that’s the 1080 ten principle. If you’re not actually actively doing that in your business, start today.

Josh Hadley 00:43:05  Action item number two. You touched on this, but it’s not getting distracted. And it’s all about focus. Entrepreneurs need to focus on revenue generating activities in their business period. And so here’s my biggest caution. Yes, there’s a lot of shiny objects out there with AI. And it could automate this and it could automate that. But the most important thing that you should be focused on in for me, it’s AI that helps generate revenue in the business. So new product opportunities, taking my brand into international marketplaces, expanding onto additional sales channels, creating new offers or new products, again that are unique, maybe even patented. Those are the areas of your business that are going to drive future growth. And so be focused on those areas. And if you’re going to implement AI, do it in those areas. My third and final action item is again doing a time study so that you understand what your time is worth and where are you actually investing your time. Because I would argue most where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck is what I call the swamp is they’ve already got $1 million brand.

Josh Hadley 00:44:09  Great, but it hasn’t yet crossed 5 million. And so a lot of it is just kind of like a lot of sweat equity in order to get yourself to the next level, well, make sure that you have identified where you’re spending most of your time, because if you’re spending most of your time trying to optimize the business and just basic processes, you’re never going to get out of that swamp. You have to be focused on again. Go back to see point number two, revenue generating opportunities to get you to that eight figure range, which then you can hire people and have them work on optimizing and making things more efficient. So those are my three actionable takeaways. Sean, anything you would add to those?

Sean Travis 00:44:45  I love it, man. Dude, if you could just implement those three, you would be such a more effective human being. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:44:51  Always something where everybody’s always working on those. That’s for sure. Sean, as we wrap things up, I’d love to ask you the following three questions.

Josh Hadley 00:44:58  Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why.

Sean Travis 00:45:01  Recently is Buyback Your Time by Dan Martell? Because then it pushed me into hiring him as my business coach, and now I’m his community. And I think everything there has just been absolutely life changing.

Josh Hadley 00:45:10  Definitely a great book recommendation. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using and how have you been using it?

Sean Travis 00:45:15  Aside from Calvin AI, everything Claude, Claude, code, clockwork Claude, or perplexity and perplexity? Computer. Between those two, I think you could take over the world. And then for content generation, either Freepik or Higgsfield. I like free pick more for e-commerce purpose, but if I had to pick, I would say Claude and Freepik. You could just have at it.

Josh Hadley 00:45:35  Love it. I guess my third and final question that I think I already know the answer to, but who is somebody that you would recommend other people follow?

Sean Travis 00:45:42  Yeah. Dan Martell. Yeah. If you haven’t already. Hop on.

Sean Travis 00:45:45  He is. He’ll give it to you straight. Just follows Instagram. Follows YouTube. Get in his world. Get in his sphere. Read his books. Yeah, he’s the real deal.

Josh Hadley 00:45:52  Fantastic. Well, Sean, this has been awesome. Great having you back on the show. If people want to learn more about you, want to learn more about the software that you’ve built, where’s the best place to find you.

Sean Travis 00:46:00  At ecom for heroes with one M not to like ecomm breakthrough, but ecomm for heroes were on all the social media. So LinkedIn, Instagram, Instagram is probably the easiest. Or you can email me Sean Sheehan at Ecom one for heroes. Com. Yeah, and just message Hadley last name here. Josh Hadley. If you guys want 10% off any of our items. And then I’ll also include a affiliate link for Josh for Calvin to give to you guys as well.

Josh Hadley 00:46:24  Beautiful. Well very generous of you, Sean. Given the the audience a massive value there. So definitely go follow Sean.

Josh Hadley 00:46:31  Go check out his tool. Lots of really exciting stuff that again, it’s not necessarily I think going to replace Ava. It’s going to replace a lot of the things that they were doing. However it’s going to ten x their productivity. So instead of just doing one product per month now it’s like, hey, I want you giving me ten new products per month. That’s the power of this tool. So Sean, thanks again for joining us on the show today.

Sean Travis 00:46:52  Thanks for having me man.

Josh Hadley 00:46:53  All right. So I spoke to Sean after the show because I wanted to clarify whether if I upload new products into this tool in my own brand, if those product ideas are going to be shared with everybody else. That was my main concern is my IP protection. And so Sean did come back and reassure me that it’s only for like new product discoveries, for those that are like starting out with a brand and stuff like that, those product ideas get shared to the world after 14 days. But if you’re like an existing brand owner, those ideas do not get shared out to the public, which is good news.

Josh Hadley 00:47:20  So continue on.

MC 00:47:22  Thank you for listening. Visit Ecomm breakthrough com for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time!