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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Alex Bonilla, founder of Delta Brands, about scaling eCommerce businesses using TikTok Shop. Alex explains how the platform has shifted from an organic, mass-sampling approach to a competitive, pay-to-play environment. He shares strategies including affiliate live selling, creator retainers, and controlled virality. Alex also discusses training creators on retention metrics and hooks, optimizing TikTok ads, and using slideshows to drive Amazon sales. The episode concludes with advice on building creator relationships, assembling a specialized team, and diversifying across emerging social commerce platforms.

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

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction and Creator Development
Alex discusses the importance of nurturing new creators and building them into brand advocates through support and training.

00:00:29 Podcast Introduction & Guest Background
Host introduces the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, Josh Hadley, and guest Alex Bonilla, highlighting Alex’s eCommerce experience.

00:02:12 TikTok Shop Evolution & Current Landscape
Discussion on how TikTok Shop has shifted from easy virality and mass sampling to a more competitive, pay-to-play environment.

00:03:36 What’s Working on TikTok Shop in 2024
Alex explains that old strategies no longer work and emphasizes the need for updated approaches as TikTok Shop matures.

00:05:52 Affiliate Live Strategy & Inventory Management
Alex shares how affiliate live streams help control virality, manage inventory, and maintain creator relationships.

00:08:27 Retainer Model for Top Creators
Advice on putting high-performing creators on retainers for consistent content and negotiating video rights.

00:10:09 Sampling & Creator Outreach Evolution
Alex describes being more selective with sampling and how established brands attract higher-quality creators organically.

00:11:24 Building a Core Team of Creators
Focus on maintaining a smaller, high-performing team of creators on retainers, rather than mass sampling.

00:13:27 Homegrown vs. Recruited Creator Talent
Discussion on the value of developing loyal creators versus recruiting established talent from other brands.

00:16:17 Training and Supporting Creators
Alex details how he educates creators on retention metrics, hooks, and video structure to improve performance.

00:19:41 Key TikTok Video Metrics & Content Tips
Explanation of retention rate benchmarks and practical tips for creators to increase video engagement and virality.

00:21:20 Optimizing GMV Max Ads with Retention Data
How to use TikTok ad analytics to identify and promote high-performing videos, including manual campaign hacks.

00:23:15 Manual Ads, Spark Ads, and External Traffic
Alex discusses experimenting with manual ads, Spark ads, and driving traffic to Amazon/Shopify for additional touchpoints.

00:24:49 Team Structure for TikTok Shop Success
Breakdown of Alex’s team roles, including customer service, inventory, GMV Max optimization, creator recruitment, and community management.

00:27:21 Recruiting and Managing Creator Relationships
How to structure deals with creators, manage retainers, and protect against underperformance with contract clauses.

00:31:04 Slideshow (Carousel) Strategy on TikTok
Explanation of using slideshow posts for organic reach and Amazon sales, including compensation models and content monitoring.

00:34:22 Future of Social Commerce: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
Alex forecasts the rise of social commerce on other platforms and advises brands to diversify beyond TikTok.

00:36:46 Comprehensive TikTok Shop Strategy Recap
Emphasis on leveraging all TikTok content types and replicating successful strategies across other social platforms.

00:38:00 Three Actionable Takeaways for Brand Owners
Host summarizes key actions: build creator relationships, develop a specialized team, and focus on off-Amazon demand creation.

00:39:50 Raising Prices Through Off-Amazon Demand
Discussion on how social commerce enables brands to increase prices and reduce reliance on Amazon’s ecosystem.

00:41:27 Final Thoughts on Amazon Changes & Social Commerce
Alex shares how social commerce mitigates Amazon’s challenges and allows brands to thrive despite platform changes.

00:42:59 Book Recommendations & Inspiration
Alex lists influential books, especially “10x is Easier Than 2x,” and how it shaped his TikTok strategy.

00:44:05 Favorite AI Tools for Content Creation
Alex mentions using AI video tools (e.g., Vo3) for scalable, high-quality content across platforms.

00:45:28 Industry Influencers to Follow
Alex recommends following Josh Hadley, Fernando Campos, and the Limited Supply podcast for eCommerce insights.

00:47:41 Contact Information & Closing
Alex shares how listeners can reach him for TikTok Shop strategies and the episode concludes.

Tools and Websites
“TikTok Shop“: “00:01:41”
“GMV Max Ads“: “00:21:20”
“Veo3“: “00:44:05″Books
“The E-Myth“: “00:00:56”
“Unlimited Power“: “00:42:59”
“The 4-Hour Workweek“: “00:42:59”
“10x is Easier than 2x“: “00:43:33”
“The Science of Scaling“: “00:43:56″People Mentioned
“Ezra Firestone“: “00:01:00”
“Kevin King“: “00:01:00”
“Michael E. Gerber“: “00:01:00”
“Brandon Young“: “00:37:45”
“Fernando Campos“: “00:46:03″Videos
“AI Fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt“: “00:45:04″Additional Notes
“Discord for Slideshows”: “00:31:04”
“Affiliate Lives Strategy”: “00:06:03”

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!

Transcript:

Alex Bonilla 00:00:00  Don’t worry so much about trying to find these creators that are already crushing it. Like find the creators who are willing to learn with you, grow with you, and eventually become a rock star because of you, right? Because of your product and because of what you were able to give them in terms of support. Make them like create these rock stars and brands are doing this all the time. Some of the really good brands out there have their own courses where people are paying to learn how to do TikTok, and in return, they’re promoting that brand’s product.

MC 00:00:29  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 00:00:42  If you’re still 100% dependent on Amazon for your sales, you’re building on rented land, and today’s guest is going to show you how to change that by scaling your business off of Amazon, specifically on TikTok. Shop. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast.

Josh Hadley 00:00:56  I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales. And now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures. I bring you the unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests includes Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael E Gerber, author of the E! Myth. Today, I am excited to introduce you all to Alex Bonilla. He is an eCommerce brand builder and the founder of Delta Brands. Alex is a true operator behind the scenes, someone who’s been in the trenches building and scaling DTC businesses, especially in competitive markets where attention is everything. He’s not just talking theory. He’s actively building brands that successfully acquire customers outside of Amazon and then turn that traffic into profitable growth. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Alex.

Alex Bonilla 00:01:41  Hey, thanks for having me. Josh. Good to see you, brother.

Josh Hadley 00:01:43  Alex. Super happy to have you on the show here because you and I, whenever we’re in like the TikTok mastermind, we’re always battling there at the end with, like, who has the best hack of what’s working on on TikTok shop right now.

Josh Hadley 00:01:54  So you you are a guy that I have been following. I think it was last inspire a few years back that you were talking about TikTok shop, and I was like feverishly writing down notes. So you’ve been in the game for a while. You were what I would call an expert in the TikTok shop space. So I know our audience is going to be super excited to hear what you have to say today.

Alex Bonilla 00:02:12  Awesome, man. Yeah, thanks. Now I’m loving the TikTok. You know, the whole change that we’ve all seen in the past two years with how much TikTok has had an impact on our Amazon businesses. You know, we’re all kind of Amazon sellers, Amazon brands for the longest time. And Tick tock, Tick tock has changed all that for the good. And it’s just been a ton of fun. So I’m like living and breathing this stuff. And I love talking about it. So I mean, we.

Josh Hadley 00:02:35  Yeah, we’re gonna dive. We’re gonna jump straight in. There’s already been a lot of content that has been shared about like the cold start method.

Josh Hadley 00:02:43  And Alex has talked about that. And, you know, I have my presentation that I’ve shared about the kind of like how to just get started on TikTok shop. Today. We want to talk about, you know, to those audience members that have already built up a little bit of momentum on TikTok shop. Maybe you’re not crushing it, but you at least have creators that are creating videos about your product. You do see some light at the end of the tunnel. You’re able to invest in some ads and you’re seeing a halo effect over on to Amazon. And so you see some some good things happening. What I want to do, Alex, is dive into like what is actually working on TikTok shop today. From my perspective, the TikTok shop of 2024 that we all kind of got started on, I think is like it’s starting to change and it’s definitely becoming more of a pay to play type of game. Are you seeing that same thing or are you saying like, hey, no, the same playbook that was in 2024 is still the exact same playbook that works today on TikTok shop?

Alex Bonilla 00:03:36  Yeah, yeah.

Alex Bonilla 00:03:37  No, no, unfortunately not what worked back in 2024, which is what worked for me. Right? Like when I first went viral supplement brand and then was able to really kind of get things kickstarted with sampling, mass sampling, like all of that stuff worked pretty well. And it was kind of, I hate to say it, but kind of easy, you know, you just had to dedicate yourself to like, you know, making sure you’re posting every single day and something would hit, you know, give out a hundred samples, something’s going to hit and you’re off to the races. But you know, those, those those days are gone. There’s just too many brands on TikTok now trying to reach out to all the same creators. And technically, we actually have a shortage of creators. There’s not enough creators. So for your messages to be seen, you know, to get the sample out in the first place. You know, getting from 0 to 100 is a lot harder today, than it was back in 2024, which is why I’ve been doing a lot of this content about the cold start.

Alex Bonilla 00:04:29  You have great content about getting started as well, but once you get past that cold start, you have some social proof and you’re like, okay, this works. You know, we’ve seen some viral videos. We have a thousand sales on our product card. What to do from there is is constantly changing to, you know, so you have to be kind of on top of what’s working now and not and kind of have a good idea of what’s next. Right? There are so many different things that people are saying they’re doing that works for them. And it’s really easy to be like, okay, well, I either I have to do all of that right now, right now, or, you know, maybe you picked the wrong thing to start doing right now. You know, if you get through the cold start, you have a thousand sales on your product card. Like jumping into brand lives might not be the best move or the best use of your time and money. Lives are great.

Alex Bonilla 00:05:13  Brand lives are great. If you want to build out a whole studio in your warehouse and do that, great. But like there’s a time and place for that. So I think, you know, knowing what’s next, what’s effective, what’s working now and knowing that, and then also just knowing where you’re at in your life cycle on TikTok and what to tackle next is, is just as important.

Josh Hadley 00:05:30  Yeah. No. Makes a lot of sense. And the playbook definitely is shifting. So I’m curious to hear from you Alex. Like what is actually working today for your brand as you continue to scale because it’s no longer the mass sampling that’s just spitting, spinning off like viral videos left and right. There’s got to be more of like a dedicated strategy behind it. So what’s your TikTok shop strategy look like today?

Alex Bonilla 00:05:52  Yeah, yeah. So today for for my own brand. What’s working for us really? Well, our affiliate lives we found and we kind of stumbled upon this. We because of the way we sourced the supplement that we sell.

Alex Bonilla 00:06:03  It’s a very rare product. And running out of stock on TikTok, on Amazon is kind of what we tried to avoid. And if you do things right on TikTok, you’re going to go viral and you’re going to sell a ton of product, and it’s going to mess up all your projections for inventory, and you’re going to run out of stock. And and sure, it’s not the worst thing in the world as what it used to be back in the day when we would run out of stock on Amazon, like everyone would freak out, right? Because you have to like, you have to do the the you have to do a launch all over again. You’re going to lose rank. Now. You have to figure out a way to reset your honeymoon stage. None of that I worry about anymore, because the second you’re back in stock on tick on Amazon, because of all of the videos and all the stuff you have going on, for me at least, we just jump right back to where we were ranked, before we ran a stock.

Alex Bonilla 00:06:47  But why? Running a stock is still kind of a bummer, especially on TikTok, is because if you’ve established all of these relationships with creators and and they’re plugging your product, you know, every week, two times a week, three times a week, and all of a sudden you’re out of stock and they’re little. The shopping cart button on their videos goes away. They’re not making any money anymore. And you can burn some bridges that way. So we actually stumbled across a method where we could kind of control the virality. It kind of control sales. Staying relevant on TikTok while we figured out our inventory situation, which involved like some very, you know, high level stuff like, you know, growing more trees and stuff. While we worked on that, we had this live strategy, affiliate live strategy, where we had 20 to 30 affiliates in a WhatsApp chat, and we were just training them up on how to go live. And this was a training that I intended at TikTok headquarters to Decembers ago.

Alex Bonilla 00:07:36  They just dropped a ton of knowledge on us on how to go live for brands. At that time, they were trying to talk us into going live like on a brand level, and I took all that knowledge and applied it to affiliate lives. Basically, everything they taught us can be done as an affiliate as well. So we basically took all that knowledge that TikTok straight up told us. This is how you do it. I fed it to the affiliates, and they were able to run this live strategy for me, and we were able to kind of conservatively just, you know, pick up 100 or 200 or 300 sales a day and not have to worry about going viral because we controlled how many flash sales we gave them, how many deals we gave them, how many giveaways we gave them. We were able to control that. So we can kind of stay relevant on TikTok with, you know, our product cards still getting sales without risking going viral and completely selling out on Amazon, on TikTok, burning bridges with creators.

Alex Bonilla 00:08:27  Here we are. You know, 18 months later, we finally have enough inventory to to really hit it hard with with the creators. And I don’t have to worry about, like, starting over again on TikTok because we were always doing this live strategy with affiliates. You know, I still haven’t gone like our brand, still hasn’t gone live. But all these affiliates been going live this entire time. And now we’re going to kick into, you know, finding those creators. A lot of these creators that are doing lives are ready to go with shopping, shoppable content, shoppable videos. And I think what brands need to realize, because so much of this is starting to be pay to play now, you really need to find like your creators that are doing the best for you, establishing relationships with them and put them on some kind of retainer where they’re going to guarantee you X amount of videos over X amount of days for X amount of dollars. Right? That’s just a guaranteed retainer that helps put money in their pocket so they can kind of have this insurance that, hey, if all else fails and they, you know, nothing goes viral, they at least got something in their pocket.

Alex Bonilla 00:09:24  It’s usually not a ton. Try to get rights to those videos as part of your contract. Hey, if I’m gonna give you $1,000 this month for 30 videos, yeah, you’re being protected because you’re going to make money. But, hey, let’s protect me to let me get the rights to these videos. So if nothing hits, at least I can, you know, cut them up and try them somewhere else. So yeah, putting high quality creators on some kind of retainer where they’re incentivized to keep posting and keep adapting their videos and making sure they get better and better and better. That’s that’s definitely something that we’re doing right now as well.

Josh Hadley 00:09:54  So, Alex, on that note, are you so are you doing kind of like running both strategies at the same time? You have creators that are just creating like shop videos for you. And I guess, like, are you always sampling out to new creators on an ongoing basis?

Alex Bonilla 00:10:09  Not as aggressively as we used to, right? Or not as aggressively as a brand might need to do in the beginning.

Alex Bonilla 00:10:16  At a certain point, you’re going to get to a point where you can be kind of picky. You’re going to get brand. You’re going to get creators that come to you, right? So you don’t even need to be running a bot or any kind of outreach tool. You’ll get creators that are coming to you because they love the product and they have great GMV and great posting stats, right. So that’s that’s just kind of how that would actually happen. You can set up flows to go ahead and keep doing outreach for people that are doing like a certain amount of revenue. So you can be a little bit more picky about who you’re going to be giving these samples to. Then you can be even more picky about, I know you do a good job, but at this, like, hey, if you want one of these samples, like this is what you have to give me, I’m not going to just like give you a sample and just cross my fingers and hope you post like, before we even send this out.

Alex Bonilla 00:10:57  You got to commit to this, this and this. And as your brand grows and becomes more popular and people are seeing it, you kind of have more, you know, more, you have more pool to be able to request those types of demands. Harder to do in the beginning. But as you grow, yeah, you have that pool and you should use it totally.

Josh Hadley 00:11:17  So how many people like on average, how many new samples are you giving out to new creators every week or every month at this point?

Alex Bonilla 00:11:24  Not a whole lot right now, right? We are kind of really leaning on at the moment on getting super high quality creators, putting it on some kind of retainer and having like a decent team of maybe ten creators that are doing 50 K on GMB. Get ten of those guys and you know you’re gonna have to have some high risk tolerance and maybe some extra cash to kind of invest in this because, you know, the retainer is going to be anywhere from 500 to $2000 a month.

Alex Bonilla 00:11:50  So add that up, right? It’s a nice chunk, but you’re getting guaranteed videos from proven creators. And after a month, you kind of look at your team, evaluate who’s sticking around, who am I going to pay again to keep doing this? And who am I going to go ahead and cut ties with and find someone else? You know, if you keep doing that on a monthly basis, eventually you’re going to have like a pretty solid team or a team of creators that are just crushing it for you, right? You have ten guys doing 50 k GMB for you every single month. That that adds up pretty quick. Now that’s only ten people that you had to give a sample to from. Those ten people are going to do so well and blow up sales for you that you’ll just get those organic samples coming in. So we’ll give out, you know, anywhere from just, you know, on the organic side and, you know, being able to setting our our flow Or chat bot to target higher level creators.

Alex Bonilla 00:12:39  We’re given about maybe 100 samples a week, which which is kind of low on, you know, compared to what some other brands are doing. A lot of people are giving about 100, 100 times a day. Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:12:48  No, it makes sense where you’re kind of like narrowing your focus and being a lot more selective. By the way, I mean, interesting stat is like there’s only 20,000 creators that are even producing over five K and GMV per month. So it’s like all of these brands, they’re all fighting after the same creators. So my question for you is, are you seeing it to where like because you’ve been around long enough. Like, are most of your affiliates just like existing affiliates that have worked really well for you throughout the years and like you’ve got some like right or dies that are with you or is it mostly like, do you see a lot of creators, like churning in and out through your kind of like retainer model and stuff right now? What does that look like?

Alex Bonilla 00:13:27  Yeah.

Alex Bonilla 00:13:27  So we definitely do have some some ride or die guys, and I love those guys. One thing I always love to touch on when this topic gets brought up is, you know, everybody’s trying to find that creator who is crushing it for maybe not one of your competitors, but someone like in the space, like if you’re in supplements, right? Everybody knows how well some of these goalie people do. Everybody knows how well some of these neuro gun people do. And, you know, everyone’s thinking like, let’s go and try to, you know, swoop those people and get them on board with with my team. What people don’t realize is most of the time that creator that is now doing 50 k GMB, there’s a really good chance the month before they did zero right and a month before that they did zero. For that they did. And all of a sudden something clicked. They hit it off and they’re crushing it. They’re crushing it with goalie. And then the next month they crush you more and even more.

Alex Bonilla 00:14:16  This creator now is a rock star, right? They’ve only been a rock star for like three months. So I always try to stress that, hey, don’t worry so much about trying to find these creators that are already crushing it. Like find the creators who are willing to learn with you, grow with you, and eventually become a rock star because of you, right? Because of your product and because of what you were able to give them in terms of support. Make them like create these rock stars and brands are doing this all the time. Some of the really good brands out there have their own courses where people are paying to learn how to do TikTok, and in return, they’re promoting that brand’s product so that that’s like a that’s like a super high level, genius way, way of doing it. So yeah, I’m all about, you know, having your long term ride or die creators that come, come along. But I also have to it’s hard for me to turn down any opportunity I have to work with a creator who has maybe already crushed it for another brand, and bring them on board to, even if it costs a lot of money.

Alex Bonilla 00:15:12  And they’re kind of. But yeah, I would say it’s about it’s a good mix of, I would say 60, 70% homegrown talent is what I like to call it versus 30 to 40%. Let’s just go and see if we can recruit some of this, this top level talent, kind of like in sports, you know, like you have your your farm system and baseball. You have the homegrown talent. But every, you know, every once in a while you have to go out and get your show. Hey.

Josh Hadley 00:15:34  I love it. I love that analogy. Yeah. So, Alex, on that note, I love that you have like, you’ve got to teach these people how to, you know, become that rock star and you’re providing them the training materials and you’re building a relationship with them. So walk me through, like, what are the things how are you teaching them? Because even of it in and of itself, I think it’s a genius hack where you have your own business, where you’re teaching a bunch of creators, sourcing a bunch of creators, then flip them onto your own products.

Josh Hadley 00:16:01  That in and of itself is its own business that can consume 40 hours a week just on that one thing. So how do you do both where you’re still the brand owner? You’ve got to operate the brand, but you also want to be teaching these, you know, creators at the same time and building a relationship with them. What does that look like for you?

Alex Bonilla 00:16:17  Yeah. So in the beginning, you know, it was me for the most part, jumping in, hanging out in the discord, doing weekly, monthly calls. People were seeing my face very often. But eventually, if you do that right, and I suggest if you can try to do that, you know, the brand owner being involved is is huge, right? These people love interacting with the brand so they feel more like a part of the team. Also, keep in mind a lot of the brands right now on TikTok are foreign owned brands that they’ll never meet the owner of those brands. So if they have an opportunity to hang out with a brand that is from the US and the owners in the US, and the owner can communicate with them and, you know, socialize with them, they love that, right? So if you can do it, do it.

Alex Bonilla 00:17:02  If there’s someone on your team that has to do it, get someone on your team to do it. Eventually, some of these creators who, you know, kind of show what they got. They’ll be the ones who you can eventually hire to kind of take over this, this training and ongoing training and, and all that. But the training is pretty simple. In the beginning, you’d be surprised how many of these creators just don’t understand some of the basics, right? They think, you know, all you have to do is just come on TikTok and and give like a testimonial style video, and eventually something’s going to go viral. Right. But a lot of these begin, especially now that the threshold is being lowered and lower for how to become affiliate. First it was 5000, probably even 10,000 for the but 5000. And then now it’s just like a thousand. So a lot of these people are getting affiliate access without even trying. Right. They also they just get a notification from TikTok like, oh, you can you can start playing shop now.

Alex Bonilla 00:17:52  And they don’t even know why. It’s because they got 1000 followers and it’s not too hard to get a thousand followers. So next thing you know, they’re like, oh well, let’s try this affiliate thing. Oh, apparently I get free stuff if I just, you know, request samples. So they’re kind of like falling into this space on their own with absolutely no direction. And the first thing I teach people when they come across our group or get invited to our group, is just the simple metric of retention rates and how how important your retention rate is in order to go viral. If you know this as a brand, it’s going to be super easy for you to relay this information to any creator and help them out like tenfold right off the bat. And those numbers are simple. It’s you need a 70% retention rate on your videos at two seconds and a 60% retention rate at six seconds. And you just tell I mean, I just have a little small like five minute course on how to go and look at your retention rates on all your past videos and just teach them like, hey, this is how you find your rates.

Alex Bonilla 00:18:45  Go look at a video that did terrible like 100 views. I guarantee you didn’t even come close to those numbers. And now go look at a video that, you know, maybe got 5000, 6000 views and check those numbers. I guarantee you they’re way better than the ones from before. So what was it that you did in those in those two videos that you can tell there’s the difference there and start working on that. Those first six, seven, eight seconds are the most important part of your video work on that, which is all about hooks. And then we have a whole course on what a hook is, what a hook does, what hook doesn’t do. Work on that and you’ll improve those metrics. And that’s that’s how you go viral. Then we have, you know, more content on, you know, what a payoff is and call to action. And when the call to actions are appropriate and whether or not appropriate text overlays, captions, all that pretty simple stuff to to anyone who’s been doing this for a while.

Alex Bonilla 00:19:33  But you have to keep in mind, like a lot of these creators, this is this is brand new to them. So if you can teach them up, they’ll pay you back with with loyalty for sure.

Josh Hadley 00:19:41  Yeah, I love that. So you hit on those metrics that I think are really important. And I don’t even think a lot of brand owners know this. So 70% retention rate at two seconds. What’s the six second retention rate 60%.

Alex Bonilla 00:19:54  So yeah you don’t want to see a huge drop off right.

Josh Hadley 00:19:57  That’s still pretty high.

Alex Bonilla 00:19:58  Still pretty high. But if you hit those numbers you’re going viral. So you know some simple tips that I like to give creators. Just like don’t show the product in the first eight seconds. If you if you can’t, if you can hold off on showing the product, or at least just don’t make it too obvious that this is an infomercial, right? If you don’t want to buy stuff, scroll like don’t do that right? Unboxing videos. If you’re not getting Kardashian like no one wants to see a unboxing video.

Alex Bonilla 00:20:22  So there’s. There are things you can do in those first eight seconds where you’re, you’re you’re basically promising some type of solution to some type of problem, introducing a problem and promising a solution without giving the solution in the first eight seconds. A lot of people surprising you can pack all that in eight seconds. You can easily talk about a problem and give a solution pretty damn fast without even knowing you’re doing it. So try dragging that out as long as you can. Don’t give them the solution until later, but definitely introduce the problem. Let them know you’re about to solve the problem in the first eight seconds, and you’ll see your your retention rates jump up.

Josh Hadley 00:20:56  Fantastic advice. And Alex, one thing that’s been interesting on TikTok shop on GMV Max ads. If you go into the analytics portion, guess what you get to see behind every video ad performance. And I can go and look at every video from each of the creators in GMV Max ads right now, and I can see what the retention rate is at two seconds and what the retention rate is at six seconds.

Josh Hadley 00:21:20  So guess where you think my team is spending most of our money on? Which videos and which ones are we trying to tell GMB Max to focus on? It’s those ones with better engagement. So we’re seeing it like 50% or above two. Second rate actually has a pretty sizable like ROI. Now, it might not be a viral video, but it has a really good ROI from an.

Alex Bonilla 00:21:40  That’s a good video to put money behind, right?

Josh Hadley 00:21:42  Yep. Love it. All right Alex, this has been juicy so far. So what else are you doing? Well.

Alex Bonilla 00:21:47  Yeah, I kind of want to piggyback on. Let’s double click on that real quick. There’s a lot of people don’t know that. There is still a way you can kind of manually manipulate GMV max, right? So GMV max, everyone’s probably most people who hear what you just said, they’re probably like, well, what do you mean, GMV? Max, you can’t really do anything. You just have to, like, turn it on and let GMV max choose which videos to do.

Alex Bonilla 00:22:06  But what you’re saying is you can actually run GMV Max as a auto campaign. Collect all the data. Right? Find all the videos that have a retention rate 50% or more. You can do something as simple as just fine. All the videos that don’t have that retention rate and pause them. A lot of people don’t know that you can pause videos or turn them off, right? So they’re no longer getting GMV max spend. Or you can take all those videos, pause that campaign, create a new campaign, and there’s a little switch where you can just toggle it to a manual campaign. It’s not as manual as the manual campaigns from the past, but you can tell GMB Max which videos to look at, and you’re taking that data. You’re taking the data from the previous campaign, and you’re taking all the videos that did 50% retention rate at two seconds and above. Put that in the manual campaign and run just those videos and maybe weekly update it right. Takes them out, puts them in, takes them out, puts them in.

Alex Bonilla 00:22:57  That’s a that’s a that’s a, that’s a hack in its own right. On how to kind of manipulate GMB max to, to perform better. A lot of people don’t know about manual. Some people don’t even know about the ability to to turn off videos within a campaign.

Josh Hadley 00:23:10  Are you doing any like spark ads or anything like that, or are you just running GMB max ads.

Alex Bonilla 00:23:15  We are playing around with so on the manual side, right. So yeah, so everyone still has access to manual ads. And the reason why those exist is because you can actually drive that traffic externally, right. So you’re not going to be able to run those manual ads and get TikTok shop sales. But you can tag Amazon link to Amazon, link to Shopify. You can just do a reach campaign where you just try to get as many views as possible. We do put a little money in that, a couple hundred dollars a day where videos are just racking up views, racking up clicks. We’re constantly experimenting with where those clicks go.

Alex Bonilla 00:23:49  We’re played around with Shopify, haven’t had a ton of success there using Amazon Associate links and sending it to Amazon. Still kind of try to figure out the best way there. but in the end, I just like the views, right? So if I’m getting decent CPMs and I know that the videos that had performed the best in the past are also getting constant exposure on TikTok. It’s another touchpoint, right? I think on average it takes a customer five and a half times seeing your product before they finally pull the trigger. If you can kind of speed that up with running some manual ads, even if they’re going to Amazon or going to Shopify, or sometimes they can go nowhere. They just if someone clicks on, it just goes to your profile and you can get some more followers and whatnot and more likes. I like paying for that extra touch point to kind of just speed up the whole flywheel of TikTok. So yeah, we do do that.

Josh Hadley 00:24:36  Fantastic. So follow up question would would be this what does it look like from your team standpoint? Like what team members do you have in order to execute all of this, or is it are you just a solo operator? I run it on all of this.

Josh Hadley 00:24:49  Tell me about what your team structure looks like now.

Alex Bonilla 00:24:51  Yeah I wish well, no, I don’t wish. I do have that Superman complex, but I feel like, you know, you kind of have to do everything yourself. But I finally got out of that a couple of years ago. I did hire integrators. So he’s kind of helping us with with all of that. I do have someone who on the team, we have someone, you know, customer service. Right? Same guy that does customer service for Amazon is doing customer service for TikTok. We have like our inventory manager who’s just in there all day making sure orders are getting out, some of the orders, some of the products we fulfill ourselves, some obviously some goes to empty. I have a GMB Max guy who just lives in GMV max. That’s his only job. Just to sit there and make sure that is being optimized. I have a guy who will constantly go out and try to find like these high level, kind of like a recruiter, right? And again, you know, there’s a time and place for that.

Alex Bonilla 00:25:35  You need to be able to afford this, right? Don’t pay someone to go find enough creators who are going to cost you even more money, right? Until you’re ready for this. So obviously we’re in a good spot for that. So his only job all month is just to, like, find more creators who are willing to go on retainer for us, and maybe cutting ties with some other traders who we’ve already paid didn’t work out too well. He manages all those relationships. Then we have a manager who manages our slideshow discord. That’s another thing we can get into. And then a manager who manages our shoppable video discord. And then I just kind of come in and say, hi, I actually manage the the live one because I was the one that went to that course in TikTok at TikTok headquarters for affiliate lives. So that’s a WhatsApp group. I’m doing that one myself, but I do have a the same customer service manager in there, constantly refreshing flash sales and helping people with whatever it is they need.

Alex Bonilla 00:26:26  So that’s pretty much the scope of it.

Josh Hadley 00:26:29  Fantastic. So I want to double click into a couple areas. Number one, you have quote unquote, your recruiter who’s going out and searching for new creators to bring on to the program. What does that look like today? I’m just kind of curious, like whether it be market rates or averages, because we’ve also started to see this kind of like ship turn where a lot of creators are now. Hey. Yeah. You want me to talk about your product? Like, you pay me up front and they’re already sending us back like, you want one video X amount, you want 15 videos, X amount you want 30 x amount. And some of those are really high. And also what’s hard about TikTok shop is like just because you crushed it over here with this other product definitely does not mean you’re going to crush it with my product. So how are you navigating that? And what are those relationships look like where TikTok shop is just honestly becoming that pay to play game, especially with the top creators, that it’s like they have their pick of the litter of where they want to go right now.

Josh Hadley 00:27:21  So what type of structures, what type of deals are you doing? Because you could easily spend 100 K a month just in retainers with these creators. And honestly, they might not even get collectively 100 K worth of GMV for your brand.

Alex Bonilla 00:27:34  Yeah, no, that’s 100% true. And that happens sometimes. That definitely happens to you. It’s easy to get burned by, you know, there are people out there who would love to be put on retainer to go out and find more creators to be put on retainer. And all they’re really doing is just like making more money for their friends or whatever, and it ends up not working out. So whoever you have on your team, that is their job, is to go out and find more people to join the group and maybe figure out who’s worth what. I would recommend if you can recruit that guy from somewhere who has already established a bunch of relationships with creators in the past, I got pretty lucky. The guy we have on board has been doing this for years, and he has like, he just has a ton of creators, like in his Rolodex of people to reach out to.

Alex Bonilla 00:28:22  And if there’s a particular product that I need to get creators for, I just run it by him. And within a couple of weeks, he has a list of people for me to, to look at and give them the go head or, or the red light. So what I look at in those terms are, you know, people can come to you all day and be like, oh, this guy crushes you. He only wants $1,000 for 15 videos. But man, he did 70 k GMV last month. Well, go and find out how he got that 70 k GMV. So I used vast amounts of data and I look at what I don’t want to see is did he do 70 K GMV across ten products. Right. So basically each product did seven K. You can figure out the average and and then just do the math like, well, okay, well if you did seven K for me, is he worth one k. In some cases it might be you know, he might be definitely worth it.

Alex Bonilla 00:29:10  But you know if he did 70 K and he’s only working on two products now. Hey that guy is. That guy’s pretty good. What if he can do 35 K for me now? Maybe he would be worth that, that thousand dollars. We also put it in our contracts that you get paid half of your retainer at day 15 and the other half on day 30, and we also have it to where we can basically cancel the contract mid-month if needed. Right. If we’re day 15 in and he’s supposed to give us 20 posts and those first ten are just garbage, there’s a good chance that the next ten are gonna be garbage, too. There’s a good chance the creator knows that, too, and he kind of might want to be out as well. He’s like, you know, I don’t want to waste the next half of this month doing more of the same. So I’ll just walk with my half that we agreed to and let’s move on. So we have that built in so we can kind of get out midway through if we need.

Alex Bonilla 00:29:59  And again, a lot of times it’s a mutual agreement. Right. Nothing’s popping. Let’s just move on halfway through. So that’s in there to protect us as well. And then we try to get rights to run these as meta ads as well. Not every creator is going to give you that. Right. But you can negotiate from there if it needs to be something additional to the retainer for those rights. We we usually pitch 3 to 5% of ad spend. If they let us use it, that seems to be working out for us. But yeah, that’s pretty much it I would say. If you can get someone on your team, or even if it’s a subcontractor, that he has good relationship, he or she has good relationships with creators from the past and and get them on board with going out there. And the sole responsibility is bringing you creators so you can negotiate price. Look at all those things and just make sure you have your contract set up to where you can have an out if you need.

Josh Hadley 00:30:50  Yeah. Really smart. I think the way you’ve structured all of that is is really intelligent. Now let’s double click into you. Briefly mention this, but what are these slides. So you have a discord slide group. What is that and how are you utilizing slides.

Alex Bonilla 00:31:04  So yeah slideshow. So just to get real basic with this, in case people don’t even know what a slideshow is. Basically it’s a carousel of stills and you scroll through them at your own speed however you like. So however long it takes you to absorb an image or read the text on top of that image, you can kind of take your time sliding through. Now, you’ve probably seen these before as usually someone like showing their outfits or you know what they eat in a week or something like that. But a lot of creators have figured out a way to kind of promote products in these slides. And now they are they’re not TikTok shoppable. You can’t tag products in the slides, but in a way, it’s kind of good because now they’re in a different algorithm, they’re not in the shop algorithm, and they can rattle off a ton of views if the slide is done right, and it’s kind of fluid throughout the whole thing, from the first slide to the last slide.

Alex Bonilla 00:31:48  If it’s all like all makes sense, these can do really well in terms of plugging a product at the end. And if they rattle off a few million views, you will see your Amazon sales just take off. You’ll know when you see your Amazon sales all of a sudden on a random Tuesday. Sales are doubled. You go to your slideshow discord and you said, all right, who’s crushing it right now? Someone’s going to raise their hand. You’ll find you’ll find the slide. And and you just know that that that that viral slide is what’s making up these Amazon sales. And the call to action in these slide shows is usually this is the product I use. Go find it on Amazon search this use this keyword. So these work surprisingly when I first saw them I was like there’s no way these work. Like there’s like no one watches slides, but they work. I mean, they work really well. And kids will do these slides for you. You can get them as cheap as 150 to $300 a month.

Alex Bonilla 00:32:40  They’re going to post every single day for 30 days, and you’ll pay them a bonus on views. That’s kind of really the only way to do it is bonus on views, because there’s no way to really track the sales for every million views. They get us views, so they have to send a screenshot of their of their regional views for every million US views per month. We’ll give them an extra $250. So in the end, this kind of all averages out to about 30 to $0.50 CPMs, which is amazing. But still, you have to keep a close eye on what some of these accounts are doing. Make sure they’re not kind of manipulating views. Sometimes they’ll use the first few slides to talk about something that has nothing to do with your product, and then all of a sudden plug your product at the end that that’s not going to get you any sales. So keep an eye on that. Make sure that the content is good. And as long as you have good content, good call to actions.

Alex Bonilla 00:33:26  Get a team of about ten kids doing this. This is not only going to help your sales on on Amazon, but it’s another touchpoint on TikTok. Right? We talked about those five and a half touch points. If you can get one of those touch points out of the way with with manual ads, one of those touch points out of the way with a slideshow. Now you just need three creators to to make up your other touch points, and that’ll help the overall flywheel on TikTok help your product card, too.

Josh Hadley 00:33:49  I love that strategy. there’s so many rabbit holes we could go down. I think the last thing I want to wrap up here with is, where do you see the puck moving with Facebook, Instagram and even YouTube shorts? Because I think there’s some noise being said in those circles about e-commerce and things like that. If you were to put on your forecasting and your speculation goggles here, what do you think happens over the next 6 to 12 months on these different platforms? Should brand owners be doubling down on Facebook and Instagram, which honestly seem like dinosaurs at this point compared to TikTok shop?

Alex Bonilla 00:34:22  Yeah yeah yeah yeah.

Alex Bonilla 00:34:23  So I, I do think that TikTok woke up these sleeping dinosaurs, if that’s the thing. Sleeping dragons. Is that what it is? Yeah, all of it. They woke him up. Right. And it’s actually quite surprising how many people are are still not still. But how many people use Facebook Reels? Instagram Reels? I use Instagram a lot still. So those reels are doing really well as far as what I like to call organic to Amazon content. So it’s kind of the same way that slideshows work. Instagram is being used as well as Facebook, as a way to kind of still promote products with the sole purpose of getting people over to Amazon to purchase that product. Now, I think TikTok is kind of like opened everyone’s eyes to this whole idea of social commerce, and it’s only a matter of time before Instagram copies exactly what TikTok is doing. They’re already trying, right? I think yesterday they made an announcement on Instagram shop. It’s not quite the same thing, but now people can tag products in their videos and get paid commissions, so we’re on their way there.

Alex Bonilla 00:35:24  It’s going to happen eventually. Same with YouTube. And then on Facebook, the reels, their Facebook and Amazon have a relationship right now that a lot of people don’t know about. But if you put an Amazon link in a real description, meta will see that link. Take the main image off of Amazon and overlay it onto the reel. So it’s a tagged reel with Amazon Sales. A lot of people are sleeping on that right now, but I think that’s going to be a huge one. Being able to get Facebook creators to post about your product and then whitelisting those posts and running ads to it, I think is going to be huge. If you’re not doing that. Start playing around with that now. But yeah, I think there is going. Right now, let’s just say TikTok is making up 90% of the social commerce sales. I think eventually it’s all going to even out. There’s going to be 30% on Instagram, 30% on Facebook, and let’s store YouTube in there and then TikTok as well.

Alex Bonilla 00:36:19  So you’re gonna you’re going to need to be on all four of these platforms at a certain point, kind of running the same strategies. Jump on the other ones early while it’s still a wild, wild West, just like TikTok was before. All the violations start coming in. But just yeah, keep your keep your eye out on all of it, because it’s all going to be moving fast. And make sure you’re do it all if you can.

Josh Hadley 00:36:37  Yeah, really good words of wisdom. Alex has been fantastic. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you think the audience needs to hear about having success on TikTok shop right now?

Alex Bonilla 00:36:46  Yeah, I think just don’t don’t, don’t sleep on all of the components to tick tock. Tick tock. Shop isn’t just shoppable videos, right? It’s not just lives. And it’s not just brand lives. It’s, you know, it’s brand lives, affiliate lives. Shoppable videos, non shoppable videos. Right. Different algorithm slideshows. Yeah. Get all of that kind of nailed down and then take that knowledge.

Alex Bonilla 00:37:10  Take that content. Take what you’re learning there. Do it on an Instagram. Do it on Facebook. You’re going to be able to create a demand for your product that you at one time just wasn’t even possible, right? And I know I think Brandon Young at one point always taught like do not create try to create demand on on Amazon. You know, run the data dive, figure out what’s going to work. Don’t think that you’re going to be able to create this demand. That’s all changed now. That’s all been flipped on its head. You can create demand now. And if you do all this right, you’ll see, you know, brand search volume for your brand on Amazon just skyrocket. And that’s the way you tend to ask your business, man. So just get after it.

Josh Hadley 00:37:45  Totally agree with that statement. Alex, this has been super enlightening. I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. Action item number one is build a real relationship with your creators.

Josh Hadley 00:38:00  Alex touched on this here at the end, but it sounds like where the puck is moving is like, hey, all of these big guys are going to be playing in the social commerce world, so what better arbitrage do you have now than getting creators that may be newbie creators that you can pick up for free? They are just willing to like promote your videos for commission, only bring them into your kind of like sphere of influence. Create an email list, create a WhatsApp, create a discord so that if. Guess what? What if Instagram actually takes off even faster than TikTok shop is TikTok shop becomes more pay to play. What if Instagram starts to flip the switch and says, like, we’re going to incentivize things over here that much further? Well, then you start to move your creators over. But you can only do that if you have a personal relationship and you could actually reach out to your individual creator. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is build a team. Everything that you talked about, Alex, is there’s kind of like a subject matter expert over each of those different things.

Josh Hadley 00:38:59  Slideshows in and of themselves are a different animal than teaching people how to go live. Then recruiting creators for shop videos and the list goes on and on. And so focus on identifying like what systems are working in your business. And if you’re the solo operator, it’s just beginning to like itemize. How much time do you spend on inventory each week. And then all you have to do is identify where’s the majority of your time going. Then go find the role to go hire that out. That takes off the majority of tasks on your plate. You then start focusing on other areas. Maybe it’s you get into the slideshows or the lives you get that systematized. Then you go hire that out. But that’s how these brands, I think, are effectively scaling. Alex, any other comment you were going to make on that note?

Alex Bonilla 00:39:42  Nah, man, I love it. I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it.

Josh Hadley 00:39:44  Definitely cool. Third and final action item is see this as the future you talked about.

Josh Hadley 00:39:50  Like, hey, it used to be never create your own demand. But instead I think the game today, if you’re going to be relevant on Amazon, you do have to create your own demand because the days of just arbitrage Amazon’s existing keywords, yes, it exists and it will always exist. However, margins are getting really slim, and if you don’t want to be beholden to Amazon and guess what’s going to happen? FBA fees are going to continue to increase. Amazon removing the ability to charge your ad spend on credit cards. That will be a thing, and Amazon delaying your payments even further, hurting your cash flow. Guess what? These are things that are going to continue to evolve as you continue to play the game on Amazon. So what’s the best thing that you can do to absorb these fees and cash flow impacts? Raise your prices. How do you raise your prices? Create demand and awareness for your products off of Amazon basically becoming a real brand, right? And real brands become a brand because of the associations that they create with other things.

Josh Hadley 00:40:50  Why does Nike sponsor so many athletes? Because they want that brand association. And so that’s exactly what you’re doing when you work with these affiliates and these creators you’re now associating yourself with. Sometimes it’s the mommy bloggers and things like that. Well, that’s the right avatar for your products. That’s where you’re building trust, then that has a massive halo effect where people are actively searching for your brand, your product, your solution on Amazon. And if you need to, you can raise your prices and people will still pay for it because they found it and they trust you. Outside of just some random search that they stumbled upon on Amazon. Alex, anything else that you feel like I missed here?

Alex Bonilla 00:41:27  No, no, I think you know that. I mean, I’ll don’t get me wrong, some of the more recent announcements that Amazon made definitely made me upset. And I thought about them more than I normally do. When something like this comes out that the whole ad spend thing. Because I just love my points, right? So using a credit card for for ads, not being able to do that is definitely something that maybe upset me the most that Amazon has ever upset me in the last couple of years, because over the last couple of years, just like nothing fazes me on Amazon anymore.

Alex Bonilla 00:41:56  I don’t care about competitors, I don’t care about tariffs, I don’t care about speeds. I don’t care about storage, I don’t care about any of that. Because my main product used to be 1987, $19.87, and now it’s 32.99 and sales are up. Profit is up. Everything’s up. And we’re able to do that. Because if you do this social commerce stuff, right, and create this demand the right way, people don’t care. If your competitors are $10 less expensive to you. They saw your video. They want your product. I mean, that is so true that people almost don’t even care about your reviews anymore. So I’ve seen products do really well on Amazon. They got three and a half stars and they sell 50,000 units a month. How is that happening? Because by the time someone has seen this video 3 or 4 times and they’re going to Amazon like nothing stopping them, they’re not looking at the reviews and not looking at the competitors. They just want to find the product and buy it.

Alex Bonilla 00:42:45  Right. So so yeah, I agree 100%. Do this right. And a lot of those worries Amazon worry stuff, it will just go away.

Josh Hadley 00:42:53  Yeah really well said. All right. Final questions for you Alex. Number one what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Alex Bonilla 00:42:59  So it’s a more recent one. I’m not sure if it’s the most inspirational. I think I could probably attribute like Tony Robbins, like unlimited power when I was like 18 years old. Reading that four hour workweek obviously was a huge one for me. It kind of got me into this space. But recently ten x is easier than two x. That’s a great one that inspired me. I literally read that about three months before going viral on TikTok, and I read it was completely sold on the idea that ten axing is easier than two axing completely sold. But then I would sit there and think to myself, like, okay, well, how do I do this? This is going to be how do I do this? I’m sold, but I don’t know what to do.

Alex Bonilla 00:43:33  And then TikTok came, came around. And that’s when I realized, okay, well, this is how we do it. So I do have a goal in two years where almost a year in on that and we’ve already three x. So we’ll see if we can if we can hit that ten x mark. So looking forward to that really good book. I highly recommend reading it. There’s already a follow up on it. I already forget the name, but I think it’s called The Science of Scaling. Check both of those out if you get a chance.

Josh Hadley 00:43:56  Yeah, those are fantastic books. Benjamin Hardy is the author. Fantastic recommendation.

Alex Bonilla 00:44:01  Yeah, definitely.

Josh Hadley 00:44:02  Alex, what’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using? How have you been using it?

Alex Bonilla 00:44:05  Well, without getting too deep into what we’re experimenting with, but I’m loving Vo three at the moment. There are there is some content that some of you guys may have seen on Instagram. Facebook is doing really well. Kind of plays into the whole thing.

Alex Bonilla 00:44:22  I was talking to you earlier about this organic traffic that goes to Amazon. I know there’s tons of other stuff that AI can do that would make my life a lot easier, and we’re working on that too. But again, that’s more just to kind of save time, make life a little bit easier. But what I’m most excited about is just how good these videos are getting and how you’re able to make content, not TikTok content, but just, you know, content that lives everywhere. And if you can do this at scale and do it right, there’s some really cool things that can come out of this. And maybe, maybe we touch on that another time once I kind of nail it down. But these videos, man, they’re just they’re pretty amazing even on Amazon. Have you seen the the AI fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt?

Josh Hadley 00:45:03  Yes.

Alex Bonilla 00:45:04  It’s just like just mind blowing that that people can make that. So we’re playing with that a lot. So right now that’s taking up a lot of our bandwidth playing with that.

Alex Bonilla 00:45:12  That’s another topic for another time.

Josh Hadley 00:45:14  Well it’s super smart to be focused on AI, to actually grow revenue rather than just AI, to just build fancy dashboards for yourself. So our move there. Yeah. Third and final question who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-comm space that other people should be following and why?

Alex Bonilla 00:45:28  All right, so I have I do have two And I haven’t told you this and I don’t really. Yeah, definitely haven’t told you this. I haven’t told many people this, but I was first introduced to you a few years ago at Camp E-comm. I don’t know if you remember that, but you gave a presentation in the in the executive side on hiring, and that was the first time I ever met you and listened to you speak. You crushed it. Rebecca was there filming you and everything. It was just that aspect alone of the type of support you guys give each other was was awesome. I took really good note of that. It resonated with me very well, and I had been following your podcast and respecting you ever since that time.

Alex Bonilla 00:46:03  You actually kind of inspired me because prior to that I had never spoken, done any public speaking. But watching you and the way your wife was supporting you that day, my wife and I try to do that now, and I’ve been speaking at a bunch of events now. So you don’t know this, but you you were part of that inspiration for me to step out onto the speaking scene in MDS. So I want to thank you for that. And obviously anyone that’s watching this right now already follows you. So I do have one more for you guys and another NBS member, Fernando Compost. Awesome. Dude. If you get a chance to just Google him on YouTube, he’s shopping tons of knowledge for for TikTok stuff, and him and I get together every month and just go back and forth and on deals on what’s working, what’s not working. But yeah Fernando compost and that’s that’s another guy I would be following for sure. I’m one more, one more. The The Limited Supply podcast. I still love it.

Alex Bonilla 00:46:51  I’m not huge on Shopify, but we’re trying to be and a lot of the knowledge he drops, I feel like can be applied anywhere, not just on Amazon and TikTok and not obviously not just on Shopify, but a lot of that DTC type mentality. I think right now, more than ever, Amazon brands need to start learning because this is the Amazon game is changing. You know, you can create your own demand. You can run your own ads. You can, you know, do your DTC, Shopify. And if you do all that right, your Amazon is just going to crash.

Josh Hadley 00:47:19  Yeah. So true. Well excellent recommendations and I love that story. Glad glad that I were able to be a source of inspiration. It’s been fun watching you on the stage now because you’ve been crushing it there as well.

Alex Bonilla 00:47:31  Thanks, man.

Josh Hadley 00:47:31  Appreciate it.

Alex Bonilla 00:47:32  So yeah, likewise. The feeling is mutual, brother.

Josh Hadley 00:47:35  Well, Alex, this has been a fun podcast. If people want to reach out to you, learn more about you, where’s the best place to do so?

Alex Bonilla 00:47:41  Yeah.

Alex Bonilla 00:47:41  So you can shoot me an email. Alex at Delta Brands Agency. What we do there is we help brands get started on TikTok shop. We didn’t talk too much about the cold start, but if you have zero sales and you’re worried about giving out 1000 samples, I would love to talk to you about our strategy for that. Alex at Delta Brands Agency. Otherwise, yeah, I think my Instagram is. Yeah, you can find me there. I’m not too active, but shoot me an email. Be more than happy to chat.

Josh Hadley 00:48:07  Awesome. Well, thanks again for your time today, Alex.

Alex Bonilla 00:48:09  Likewise, brother. You have a good one.

MC 00:48:11  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!