Avoid Common Pitfalls That Keep Brands Stuck in the $1-5 Million Range with Brandon Young

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Avoid Common Pitfalls That Keep Brands Stuck in the $1-5 Million Range with Brandon Young


Brandon is the co-founder of the fastest growing AI powered Amazon research and marketing software, Data Dive. His strengths lie in his in-depth knowledge of Amazon’s ranking algorithm and ability to create data-based processes which improve the success rates and profitability of FBA businesses.

He also founded Seller Systems, a college level course and mastermind community with educational content for Amazon sellers (www.seller-systems.com).

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….
  • Strategies for increasing revenue in e-commerce businesses.
  • Importance of customer segmentation and understanding customer behavior.
  • RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis for identifying valuable customers.
  • Data-driven decision-making and leveraging analytics for growth.
  • Focus on customer lifetime value (LTV) and its impact on marketing budgets.
  • Continuous improvement and iterative assessment of marketing strategies.
  • Diversification of sales channels beyond platforms like Amazon.
  • Utilizing direct mail as a complementary marketing channel.
  • Emphasis on brand visibility and presence across multiple platforms.
  • Cost-cutting strategies and prioritizing profitability over revenue.


In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Brandon Young, co-founder of Data Dive and an eight-figure Amazon seller. They discuss the evolving challenges in the Amazon e-commerce space, such as margin compression and increased competition. Brandon emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement, delayed gratification, and leveraging AI for scaling. Key takeaways include focusing on leading actions, differentiating your brand, and investing in skilled talent. They also touch on the significance of management systems and the role of AI tools in business. Brandon invites listeners to explore Data Dive and upcoming training programs for further growth.

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

  1. Focus on Leading Actions
    • Brand owners should identify and measure leading actions that will drive future profits and revenue, rather than just focusing on lagging metrics.
  2. Differentiate Your Brand
    • It’s essential to stand out in the market through unique products, licensing deals, or intellectual property. Utilizing AI proactively can also provide a competitive edge.
  3. Invest in Talent
    • Hiring skilled talent is crucial for scaling. Brandon warns against hiring low-cost virtual assistants without considering their potential for growth. Investing in capable individuals can lead to a stronger team and better business outcomes.


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Episode Sponsor

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

I started Hadley Designs 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 go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.
Transcript Area
Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Aaron Cordovez and Michael E Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I’m speaking with the one and only Brandon Young, the man behind Stellar systems and eight figure Amazon seller and award winning coach and also the owner of Data Dive. So we’re excited to be diving down into some lots of rabbit holes about how to scale your brand on Amazon today. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or a consultant who can help take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for that coach or consultant, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s ecom with two M’s.
Josh Hadley 00:00:47  And let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I’m excited to introduce you all to Brandon Young. Brandon is also the co-founder of the fastest growing AI powered Amazon research and marketing software, Data Dive. His strengths line his in-depth knowledge of Amazon’s ranking algorithm and his ability to create data based processes which improve the success rates and profitability of FBA businesses. He’s. He also founded Seller Systems, a college level course and mastermind community with educational content for Amazon sellers, and he’s also an eight figure brand owner, so Brandon knows what he’s talking about. We’re excited to have him on the show. Welcome, Brandon.
Brandon Young 00:01:19  Great to be here, man. Good to see you.
Josh Hadley 00:01:20  Brandon. Always good to see you. You’re you’re a busy, busy man. So I’m glad we were able to carve out some time to have you on the show today. So, Brandon, with everything going on, I want to just jump straight into the the meat and potatoes of today’s conversation. Amazon is never harder than it ever has been before right now, right? We’ve seen a lot of margin compression happening in 2024, and it just wasn’t like the brand, the Amazon of 2015 and 2016 that you and I knew and launched into is not the Amazon world that we are living in today.
Josh Hadley 00:01:49  So to our listeners that are seven figure brand owners, like what is your message to them today, Brandon, like, is it still viable to grow on Amazon, and if so, what are the growth lever strategies that you’re employing even into your own brand to thrive and survive over the next 5 to 10 years on Amazon.
Brandon Young 00:02:03  Yeah, I think the first message is that it’s okay that things are not as easy or not going as well as you had hoped, or you know that things are down a little bit. I mean, a common story that I’m hearing from all the large sellers is that we are down year over year or that, you know, we kind of stayed flat and maybe, maybe margins are down. We saw the writing on the wall, and we made a massive investment into our own team to try to level them up. And one of the issues that we had when we were scaling is we hired a lot of juniors straight out of school for the purpose of trying to train them up.
Brandon Young 00:02:34  And what ended up happening is and my wife, Jennifer, she runs the brands business for the most part. But what ended up happening was we would have a really flat org chart. And so we have all of these juniors that can do the roles, but only to a certain extent. And then no one was really capable of stepping up into a senior leadership role or that we could elevate. And so when you end up with this really flat org chart, you end up in a position where you can’t grow beyond. You hit a wall, right? You can’t grow beyond a certain point. And so your org chart has to start adding layers at a certain point in order for you to be able to go from, let’s say, 15 or 20 million to 50 million. And I think that the natural walls people hit at 3 million are because it’s them themselves. It’s a key man issue. It’s, you know, maybe a VA or 111 insistent. And then to go to 10 million, you end up with, you know, 3 or 4 people that can help you do certain tasks.
Brandon Young 00:03:24  Maybe you’ve outsourced a thing or two PPC or whatever it is. If you’re doing your own PPC, it depends how many SKUs you have. So maybe you have a few people doing that. And then to go to 20 million or 25 million, you know, you’ve got 12, 15 maybe, you know, try and get into 20 employees and it starts to really get difficult to manage. If everyone’s reporting to you, you can only have so many direct reports. If all day you’re sitting in meetings and people are telling you what they’re doing, you’re not able to work on the business and scale it. Right. And so things start to the magic that got you to 20 is not going to get you to 50 anymore. And so the levers that we started to pull were to figure out how to turn over the team and hire more seniors and start to build out the org down so that we could scale some of these processes. The additional things that we needed to do is to elevate the content that, like you said, you could take anything in 2015 off of Alibaba, put it in a white box and sell it on Amazon, and it would sell.
Brandon Young 00:04:18  You could take a picture with your cell phone or with a random camera and put it online, and it would be enough. And now that’s not the case anymore. You have to have the best content. You have to have custom designs. You have to understand how to bundle. You have to understand what the true what the customer really wants from a features and component standpoint, from a design standpoint. And you have to deliver a really good product that can keep the review rating high. You have to have a, you know, something that is going to get great reviews over time because the amount of effort needed to develop and launch it is, is greater than it’s ever been.
Josh Hadley 00:04:52  Yeah, I think it it’s requiring a more sophisticated kind of entrepreneur, one that’s willing to create more systems and processes. And I think like the lazy approach to Amazon is has come and gone. Right. The ME2 products like that ship has sailed a long time ago.
Brandon Young 00:05:06  You’ve known me for many years, and I’ve always told people, this is not a passive income business.
Brandon Young 00:05:10  This is not a get rich quick on, let’s do it on the side business. Now you can start it that way. We’ve had hundreds of people in the inner circle start from scratch or with one product or from, you know, and build up a multimillion dollar business and become millionaires. But they started while they were still working a full time job. Right. And you can start learning ten hours at a time, ten hours per week, you know, if you can dedicate a few nights a week to learning content to launch that first product, but eventually you’re going to need to step into this and run it because it becomes its own beast. And, you know, we always tell people that the time to step away from your job is when it’s costing you money to go to work. Right? But that could be a year from now. It could be two years from now. But you better give up Netflix. You better give up your nights and weekends, and you better be working full time in this Amazon business until that time comes, and a lot of people aren’t willing to put in that work, man.
Brandon Young 00:05:57  Like, it’s not a passive. It’s not a, you know, side gig. It’s not a side hustle. It is. It is. You’re building a real brand.
Josh Hadley 00:06:03  Yeah. And Brendan, you tell me, from your experience, if you think the statement is true, but there’s been a number of people that I’ve come across that, that do get stuck in that 1 to 5 million range somewhere between there where they just kind of like stall out. And the business has become very complicated. They only have maybe an assistant or two, and then they just start to experience year over year declines in revenue. And it starts to actually like progressively spiral down from 5 million. You’re down to 4 million, you’re down to 3 million. And they’re like, I don’t know what’s going wrong here. tell me, like, do you see that happening to a lot of these brand owners? And why do you feel like we’re starting to see some of that happening right now?
Brandon Young 00:06:39  Well, it’s just where they’re allocating their time.
Brandon Young 00:06:40  And you know, so in the beginning the majority of your time is product development and product launch. And then, you know, as you have too many products that you have to manage, the majority of your time gets spent over on managing those existing products. And products have a life cycle. So if you’re not and a lot of people don’t see it this way, but if a product is only going to last 2 or 3 years without you disrupting yourself, which is a major thing we’re teaching around, you need to look at your competitors, monitor your your niche, and understand ahead of time and plan for it. How can someone disrupt me? Whether it’s more variations, more styles, more colors, more bundles, more value, then you need to come in and do that to yourself. You need to say, I’m going to launch v2 of this product, v3 of this product, I’m going to add two variations. I’m going to add a bundle. I’m going to add a pack that time that you would normally have to do that is being spent.
Brandon Young 00:07:26  And instead on just trying to stay above water. And so you need to understand like where you’re spending your time and doing and, and, and what’s really the lever that’s going to continue to grow the business. And you have to go faster the bigger you get, which means you need even more time than you were originally allocating to product development. So if you were launching ten products. But let’s be realistic, the average person was launching three products a year, right? And if you’re only launching three products a year, and then you get to year 2 or 3 and you’re at 3 million and you’re like, this is going great. And then you’ve only got one product in the pipeline. What’s going to happen to your business when when of your ten successful products you’ve got you’ve got to drop two, you know, and you’ve only got one in the pipeline. You’re that’s where the you know, it’s it’s simple. It’s really, really simple. Where is your current revenue coming from its existing products and new products? If you’re not supplementing what you’re losing from your existing products and exceeding that, then your business is going to decline.
Brandon Young 00:08:16  But how do you do that when most of your time is busy, your time as the expert in your business and the one that cares most about it, is busy maintaining where you’re at, you’re just treading water, right? So you’re going to decline naturally. So how do you solve that? You have to solve it by building an org. You have to solve it by hiring and training and getting the right people, outsourcing. And then going back to the fundamentals of product development, product launch and launching more products than you’re losing.
Josh Hadley 00:08:41  Yeah, I think it’s as simple as that. Like you just boiled it down to like very simply on Amazon, the biggest growth lever is launching new SKUs, period. Like it is what it is. And to your point, Brandon, I think this is like that. The leading measures versus lagging measures, right. Analogy where you’re leading measure on a weekly basis to know whether I’m going to be successful ten months from now, 18 months from now, 24 months from now, is how many new product opportunities did you find today and how many new quotes did you get today? How many new product IPOs did you initiate today? Those are the leading indicators of the business that yeah, they’re not like, hey, I found a new product.
Josh Hadley 00:09:17  Yeah. It’s not driving any revenue or profit in the business. Now we understand that. But that’s a leading indicator that you will have success in the future. So many people they look at like, hey, I have a $5 million business. Those are lagging metrics, right? Your profit and your revenue today is a summation of the work that you did 12 months ago. So like when you look at your PNL, it’s not like, oh, I can change this tonight really quick. Like, okay, yes, you could reduce your tacos. Yes, you could cut some things. But like your cogs are basically already baked in for the next 6 to 12 months. Your FBA fees are already baked in for the next 6 to 12 months. So it’s like you got to manage by those leading indicators.
Brandon Young 00:09:53  100%. So exactly to that point, think about it this way. Like we talk about the taxonomy of value. We spent a lot of time in calls with coaches together and in the inner circle and whatnot and, and with Ogemaw and coaches.
Brandon Young 00:10:04  But the think about it, if you’re thinking about what level you’re pulling and what it’s worth, you always have to put a value to your time and a value to the level you’re pulling. Now, what the typical person will do is say, I’ve got these ten products. My margin is being compressed, my conversion rate has gone slightly down. Let me work on this conversion rate. So they will spend 20 hours of their 40 hours a week doing that for the next three months. Now those 3 or 4 SKUs that they end up working on, and let’s say they take that conversion rate from 13% to 15%. The impact, the lagging outcome of that, to the business might only be worth $100,000 a year, $200,000 a year, if they had spent the same amount of time on product research and development and found five potential products. They would have added $1 million to the business. Right. So it’s a matter of what is the lever worth versus the time you’re putting in it, the ROI on your time.
Brandon Young 00:11:00  And so, yeah, finding, launching and designing new products is always going to be the most valuable lever with the least amount of effort you add the most to your business.
Josh Hadley 00:11:08  Yeah. So, Brandon, I think this is a great segue into the next topic, which is. All right, so what are the different levers I should be focused on pulling within my business. And you and I have talked about this a lot. Let’s say you’ve got a brand owner on Amazon. They’re doing $5 million. They want to scale to eight figures and beyond. What are the levers that they do need to be pulling in the business. And I would love your kind of experience. Talk to us about here are the different levers that we’ve played with in our business. And these are the results that we got. And the reason why I think both you and I can confidently come back and be like, it all comes back to product development. It’s because we have each pulled different levers and it’s like, ooh, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze over here.
Josh Hadley 00:11:43  But we’re always trying something new. So I’d love for you to maybe like, share with the audience. Like, what are those different levers that you’ve attempted to pull? Which one seemed to be fruitful versus not?
Brandon Young 00:11:52  Yeah, I mean, we’ve tried a bunch. So I mean, we did fare. So fare with an E-comm is a small mom and pop shops making small orders. Now you think about what’s required to go on to fare is like it’s a whole new supply chain. And that’s that seems to be the common, common issue with a lot of the different marketplaces you can go to is that you have to develop an entire new system, and there’s cost associated with that that you need to factor in. But fare would be like, a kiosk in a mall that wants to order our toys. And they’re like, they want three of this one, five of that one, and seven of another one and two of another one. Right. And they place a $500 order or a $400 order.
Brandon Young 00:12:25  Right. And it’s like, well, what do we have to do to, to, to service that when we’re used to sending in 500 units or 1500 units directly into FBA? Well, we need a three PL, we need a three PL that’s willing to break down in cases that is willing to go and pick and pull a few units from each of those open cases and then to fulfill that order for us, and there’s a large fulfillment cost for that, right? Like there’s the time and the fulfillment for that. So what’s our margin on that when we’re selling that wholesale now to somebody who still wants to be able to compete at the end price that we have to give Amazon in a competitive marketplace where we have to compete on price, and we’re already in a tight margin business in toys. Right? So we pulled that lever. We did, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars in sales over the course of a year. We were already doing 12, 15 million at the time. Maybe, you know, when we were when we decided to pull that lever and we’re like, what are we even doing wasting this time? We took we took one entire employee, put them full time into this market.
Brandon Young 00:13:16  We we had to take the time of our logistics team to deal with inventory specifically for this. So the amount of resources required to pull the lever versus the what the end result was, was, you know, we ended up losing money on it. At the end of the day, you can’t just look at it in a vacuum and say, hey, we made X margin on these sales. And it was like, you know, by the time we looked at it, we didn’t make 60 or 70,000. We had actually lost a ton of money because we took the time of the team that we had to pay. That could have been working on something much more fruitful. So that’s one. Another one is like Walmart. we pull Walmart’s lever. We hired we hired a channel manager. And to do Walmart correctly, I think that you need to go all in on Walmart to an extent that you need an entire new team, you need a logistics team. You need a marketing team like someone managing the listings.
Brandon Young 00:14:00  You need the, you know that that entire management channel. And then to understand, like we’ve got 800 or so SKUs, which hundred SKUs are 50 SKUs, are we going to start with and then and then really start to dive into. And so we’re doing $1 million on Walmart. But is it, you know, is it the 20 or more that we’re doing on Amazon. And what’s that worth to us. Can we scale that to 4 or 5 million? I think so so that’s another one that that could potentially be there. But can I scale Amazon to 50 million. Right. Versus scaling Walmart to 4 or 5 million is the question right. Because if you’re doing 5 million on Amazon, what’s Walmart with you at max? It’s probably worth one one and a half, right? If it’s 20% at most of what you’re doing on, on on Amazon. So like how do you how do you justify some of these channels. And then I see like Shopify Instagram content. What I really am interested in that we haven’t invested in is TikTok.
Brandon Young 00:14:54  But that’s another thing that you’ve tackled that you’re that you’re a lever that you’re pulling that I think could be really great. But then we have the whole uncertainty around, is it going to be a channel in six months? Right. And so we’ve been burned with the fires. We did wish very early on. So we did wish we did Faire. We’ve done Walmart. And at the end of the day, for us it’s always just been more Amazon.com to the point where we didn’t even do Amazon EU. And what’s interesting, you and I were just at Market Masters with Kevin King, which is a great event, getting people around hot seats and with experts and really figuring out helping people figure out what you know, how to help your business, go to the next level, really, really recommend something like that. But one of the sellers that I was on the hot seat that I was like a panel for is, got a product I don’t want to share too much, but has a product in the EU that’s a $10 million brand in total, doing 9 million in the EU across all the marketplaces in EU and only doing 1 million in the US, struggling in the US, but owns 50% of the market in the EU.
Brandon Young 00:15:50  And the question is, is there content that much better like in the EU? Like why are they succeeding in the EU? Is it an SEO thing? No, it actually turned out just because the the competition is so much less that you can earn more of the market, even though it’s the market is like an eighth the size. But if you own so much more of it, you know, they own one person, a few percentage points of the market here in the US, and they own 50% of the market in the EU. So even though the market is so much bigger in the US, it’s so much harder to gain a market share. Your cost per click is so much higher. Your margin is so much smaller because of that, you know, to maintain your, your your your keyword ranks, you have to be spending more on ads. And it costs you more to do that here. So you can’t make the profit that you can over there. So it’s easier to rank, it’s easier to pull that lever, it’s cheaper to pull that lever and to maintain those ranks.
Brandon Young 00:16:35  And so you can own more of the market. And I never thought of it that way. It was such an eye opener for me, which is like I just translated at 1 to 1. I just thought to myself, well, the market is a 10th the size or a fifth the size or whatever it was that if I go over there versus launching a new product. So it opened my eyes to an extent to where it’s like, you know what? It doesn’t translate as 1 to 1. I can own more of the market because there’s less competition, and it’ll be cheaper to own more of that market versus here. So my margin will be better. Yeah, maybe EU is a marketplace we should actually launch into versus just launching more products into the into.com, especially since we’ve launched so many and developed so many products. That’ll be easy for us to cherry pick the best of the best.
Josh Hadley 00:17:08  Yeah, I love that. And I love kind of like the tangible case studies of like these are things that we’ve actually like tested.
Josh Hadley 00:17:14  We’ve implemented them. This is this is what we’ve seen working or not. I think one thing that, you know, was the underlying thread here between it all was like the supply chain aspect, right? I think being able to scale out on different marketplaces is relatively easier because like the supply chain will stay figuratively the same. Right? And especially like the reason why people are saying they’re having success on TikTok shop and even on Shopify right now is because they’re able to leverage their exact same supply chain without having to move a needle. Right, because you’ve got Amazon MCF multichannel fulfillment, which allows you and they just came out with 20% discounted rates for a period of time, that this is the perfect time to go explore a TikTok shop or a Shopify or a Sheehan or a Walmart. Even though Walmart doesn’t want you to use an MCF, I still think you can. This is the perfect time to go and explore those channels to see like, hey, what happens if I do put my products here?
Brandon Young 00:18:02  And it’s a great way, it’s a great way for the trial.
Brandon Young 00:18:04  Exactly. To your point, because right now, like if you don’t have to implement all of this giant infrastructure change and it goes well, then you’re like well beyond MCF. If I do do it myself and send it to a three PL and put this in place, I can save an additional 10% or whatever that percentage is and add that to my bottom line. And you’ve tested it. The product took off. It’s working. I’d love to hear more around your thoughts around like, will that continue to work? Right? Like we had this giant TikTok workshop and one of my concerns was it goes viral. How long does that last? Right. I sell a thousand units. I sell out of my inventory on Amazon. That’s a big problem, right? Because like the lifeblood of of ranking and SEO and Amazon is being in stock. And if you’re out of stock for too long, so am I putting my Amazon business at risk is another concern. So there’s all these things that I need to try to consider when I’m deciding whether to pull those levers.
Brandon Young 00:18:45  But you can kind of work through those, right?
Josh Hadley 00:18:47  Yeah. Yeah, I think that. So first of all, I think one of the most important things is like, if you’re going to experiment with one of these channels, I do think you have to go all in on them. Now. I don’t think that means all 800 SKUs or for us, all 1600 SKUs. Quite the opposite, I think it is. You take your best sellers, take your top 5 to 10 listings, take them to that marketplace. But like, that doesn’t mean you just throw up some some random piece of crap image and listing on those marketplaces. No, it means like if you’re going to go into TikTok shop like learn, how do the titles work in TikTok shop? How do the descriptions work in TikTok shop? How is revenue generated in TikTok shop? Okay, it’s through affiliate. So how do I double down on on my affiliates and I work through affiliates like you’ve got to give it a like a plus try in that channel, but you’ve got to do it on a limited like a limited test run.
Josh Hadley 00:19:33  Right. So I think that’s like I think that’s the things that we’ve made mistakes in is like when we try to say, oh, we’re all in on this thing, right? We’re all in every product. We’re doing this, this and this. And then we take a step back 6 to 12 months and it’s like, oh, we already knew within the first couple of months this wasn’t going well. But like we made it our annual goal. So we just kept going forward on it. And so I think it’s you got to have a contained test, you’ve got to launch in those channels, you’ve got to experiment, but you’ve got to be able to look back a couple months later and be like, no, we gave this our all. We even hired experts and consultants to come in. They said we were going in the right direction, but if that if that ultimately comes up and like it’s not meeting your revenue expectations or profit expectations, like it may be time to be like, great, I can now cross this off the list of things we need to try, because every brand’s going to be different.
Josh Hadley 00:20:16  And you can say like, yeah, Walmart, it didn’t work for us. And you can confidently know or even TikTok shop, right? Everybody’s talking about Tick Tock Shop, but can you confidently go in and say like, I’ve tried it like, good for you. Glad that’s working for your brand. I actually gave it my all and it didn’t pan out the way that we want it to now then you could get even deeper and it’s like, well, you got to struggle through it to actually like till you see the fruits of success that way. but, Brandon, I loved your point, which was this is like, how can you just, like, take the how can you without reworking your entire supply chain? Do the easiest, like touch the easiest growth levers. Say, hey, let’s try to expand here knowing that. All right. Right now it might not be the most profitable, but if it starts to take off, I know what I would need to do to re-engineer my supply chain or whatever process to actually get this thing running.
Josh Hadley 00:21:01  So, Brandon, I would be curious though, now, like we talked about all these different marketplaces, like what’s on the horizon for your guys’s own brand. Like, do you believe that? Like just on Amazon, you guys can become a nine figure brand with Amazon alone? Or do you feel like no part of this is like we do have to take the bet and the swing into the retail space or into the B2C space, like, tell me your visions and the levers that you see coming down the pipeline for your own brand.
Brandon Young 00:21:25  Yeah, 100%. We need to be more than just an Amazon brand to get to 100 million. And our goal is that is to go that way. So we are looking retail. I think that we’re looking at IP. so for us, I think that the more unique your products, you need to have either some type of patent protection, you need to have, the ability to maybe do some licensing. So, dealing with, major brands and attaching them to your product is, is is huge for growth and for creating a moat.
Brandon Young 00:21:56  I like the idea of creating a moat with a series of patents or copyrights as well. So, one of the examples that you can give is that if you’ve got a sports product, for example, like one that we’re that we’ve developed it, it can only be in so many shapes. Right. And so, you if you control 2 or 3 of those shapes and there’s only one kind of remaining, so like a circular one is remaining, that’s the most common on the market. But let’s say you create one with rounded corners. you create one in a triangle, you create one in another like size, and then you protect those other shapes. Now you’ve got the opportunity where where you’re the only one that can have a unique version of that product, and then everybody else is just stuck in the circles and then, you know, and then if that functionality improves because of those new shapes, now you’ve got a real moat, you’ve got something that you can really go lean into. And that’s just one simple example.
Brandon Young 00:22:45  But across all products, you can kind of think of maybe something you can do along those lines, but you need to do it in a way that you’re trying to corner the market and, and do something unique. And because otherwise design patterns are easy to get around. Right? So if they’re, you kind of want to make sure that you’re, you’re filing multiple design patterns. I’ve got another one that I’m doing that is a, a toy product, and I’m doing it in the shape of a butterfly, for example. And what I’ve done is, I know that this is going to be successful, and I know I’m going to get copycats. Right. It tested off the charts. Right? So what I’ve done is I’ve had my design team create, eight different styles of butterflies, knowing I’m only going to launch 1 or 2 to start, but I’ve protected all eight now in order to create another type of butterfly style of this toy. It’s going to be very difficult for someone to come into the market where they’re not infringing on at least one of those other designs that I that I’ve protected.
Brandon Young 00:23:39  So I’m creating this huge barrier to entry or moat. And like their, their style of butterfly is going to have to look so weird that it doesn’t even really look like a butterfly anymore in order to come into the market. So that’s another example of like trying to protect with IP moats. But licensing is massive, right? Like you come in and like you can have a minecraft toy and all of a sudden if it’s officially Minecraft, you’re able to charge more. You’re able to, you know, your margins go up even though you’re paying that, that, that royalty on the back end, your margins are significantly better. Your conversion rates go up and you’re able to potentially look at getting into retail. So, you know, we’re looking at taking some of our existing products and our track record and our supply chain and our branding, and be able to go to some of these larger, you know, IPS and say, hey, you know, like, we’d love to do this toy with this attached to it.
Brandon Young 00:24:27  And I think that that’s going to be a big lever for us, and that allows us to then go Walmarts and targets and Dotcoms and, and physical stores and, and that’s how we’re going to get past 100 million right from the 20 we’re at. It’s not going to be with just launching another 800 products on Amazon. I don’t think on Amazon.com, I don’t think, yeah.
Josh Hadley 00:24:42  I love that. Great insights. And I completely agree with all of those strategies. I think especially on the licensing aspect of it. I mean, we saw this in, one of the brands in the the think tank over this past weekend. They have a college license, right, for one of their products. Guess how much they spend on advertising? They said $0 zero tacos, right? How many of us would want that? But it’s because he’s like, I compete with one other brand. Like, that’s it. There’s only two people on all of Amazon that have this license. Like imagine what that does to your business.
Josh Hadley 00:25:11  So I mean, Brandon, what what are your predictions in the next 5 to 10 years on Amazon? Who are the brands that survive and are thriving 5 to 10 years from now versus the brands that are just continuing to struggle? What’s the difference?
Brandon Young 00:25:22  Yeah, the difference are the people who learn. so before the biggest advantage that we would teach that helped so many people become successful was on the SEO side. Right? So it was like, how do you look at competitors who are not doing a good job with ranking and then just rank something better, and it didn’t really matter as much on the product design side. And many people were successful doing that. But now you need to be a complete seller in the in brand, in the sense that your capabilities need to be from an SEO perspective, you need to know what you’re doing. Keyword research, product analysis. Your product development strategy needs to take into account who the demographic is, what they truly want. You need to test. So you.
Brandon Young 00:25:56  I mean, we’re talking to the audience that doesn’t know what you know because of our history, but the strategies that we teach now are you go and do the research to validate a product and look at the risk of that product. But a large percentage of the time, if not all of the time, you do not move forward with ordering a product until you have validated your design. Beats the current sellers, meaning you are investing a significant amount of money up front in product development that you didn’t normally have to invest, but that is making sure that you are reducing the risk of that product launch. So I will go and I will test 5 or 10 or more designs on a product Against the competition with either a pick fu, a product opinion and in Tel Aviv. And make sure that I am winning those polls against the current best sellers before I even place my order. And so then the next step is becoming really, really good at supply chain, becoming really, really good at marketing and ads.
Brandon Young 00:26:50  And so you can’t have any holes or kinks in your armour anymore as a brand owner. Whereas before you could just be really, really good at 1 or 2 things, you have to be good at all of it. And so you need that complete course. You need that complete, those complete systems. Whereas, you know, it wasn’t the case in the past. You could kind of get by with being great at 1 or 2 things. You have to be good at everything now.
Josh Hadley 00:27:11  Yeah, I think that’s a very true statement. So, Brandon, as we begin to wrap things up here, you touched on like one of your strategies to scale to 100 million is going to be retail. Yet you also talked about, hey, we did Faire. We did the kind of retail or wholesale. Now I know there’s a difference between like going into target versus going into shopping mall kiosks and things like that. But tell me the different mindset or the your approach to retail. How’s that going to be any different than Faire, and what’s your strategy that way?
Brandon Young 00:27:38  Yeah, the.
Brandon Young 00:27:38  Products that we bring to retail are going to be very IP dependent. So it’s going to be something that is unique to the market. That is just crushing competition based on whatever that IP mode is, whether it’s going to be the attach, a attaching, you know, Dora the Explorer or, you know, Blue Bluey do it or something. Right. Or it’s going to be something that we have a patent around that no one else can do that. It just has a lot of demand. So the story that we’re telling target is give us shelf space. You have limited shelf space. Give us shelf space. It will move because of this and because we’re already marketing marketing over here. So people will be looking for it, right? that’s going to be the only way that I really want to deal with retail. It’s not going to be, to try to take something that I’ve done slightly better and bring it into to target. Right. so it will be a much different story. And those are just much larger orders.
Brandon Young 00:28:20  Right? That’ll be a five, ten, $15 million lever that we pull as a, you know, in towards the end of 2025. I mean, as we come in and we start getting orders for 2026, I think in 2026, if we do 10 million in retail, that’s kind of our target. I don’t see us, you know, making up the majority of that 100 million that way. But the online is online is still king, right? so whether TikTok starts to become a large percentage of that and we can do ten, ten or more million on TikTok and then additional marketplaces, we’re looking at Japan, we’re looking at EU, we’re looking at expanding our current catalog and then launching a lot more products. So we have another line that we’re launching as well, another brand, which is a sports brand, and we’re looking at higher dollar amount product. So we’re looking at things that people don’t want to deal with. So average price point 150 to, you know, $400 and much larger oversized products.
Brandon Young 00:29:10  People, people don’t like copycats, don’t have the, the budget, they don’t want to take the risk, and they won’t have the supply chain that we are going to invest in to create that will give us those advantages on on seller fulfilled prime and saving in, on on fulfillment.
Josh Hadley 00:29:24  Yeah, I love that. I think business is just a game of continuously being able to level up, right, as you talked about there. Right? You got to level up from where you’re at. And I think the question that brand owners need to ask themselves are, are you better than you were last year? Not just profitability wise or revenue wise, or how many products. It’s you as a person and as a business owner, have you leveled up your game and your strategies? Because if you want to take your business to the next level and you do want to stay relevant, you’ve got to approach business differently. And Brandon, I love that. Like, yeah, you got started. And let’s call them like some lower cost product categories to begin with.
Josh Hadley 00:29:57  All right. The moat or you know, to get into those product categories or the hurdles are lower right. They’re lower cogs. And so it’s easy for me to do a bunch of different test orders and things like that. But then when you start working on the higher dollar value stuff, right, and you’re dealing with oversize fees and things and shipping and all of that, like very few Chinese knockoffs are going to be trying to compete in that space because it’s it’s a beast and it takes a lot of capital to do it. So that’s what I refer to as like level yourself up. So take that capital that you make and don’t go buy yourself a big house. Right? I think the person that’s able to like delay gratification the longest ends up with the biggest business at the end of the day.
Brandon Young 00:30:31  So we got to tell.
Brandon Young 00:30:32  We got to tell Jennifer that because we haven’t bought a house yet. We’re getting a little tired. I think what we decided to finally do, though, is we’re going to like, we should have done this a few years ago.
Brandon Young 00:30:40  We are. The rents in Miami are absolutely absurd. So we’ve been renting a townhouse for the last seven years, and it’s like 3 or 4 years ago we should have moved into like one of these luxury condos with all the amenities. So, you know, we’re sitting here and we’re thinking to ourselves like, hey, it’d be nice to have a pool. It’d be nice to have a gym. you know, a sauna. It’d be nice to have all these things. What’s an extra 14 hours a month for us, right? Like we don’t want to go buy a house. I think the market’s about to crash. What? We thought that in 2000 also. So. But yeah, we’ve put off gratification a long time. So that’s funny. And I think that, to your point though, I mean, this wouldn’t be a complete podcast without mentioning I too. Right? So we’ve been using AI for product design for quite a while. It is a massive lever that you need to pull, but in every aspect.
Brandon Young 00:31:17  So product development, images, content. How do you leverage AI to become smarter, better, more efficient in your business? And then with, you know, with ads, tools to write like, you know, there’s a couple on the market that are okay that are leveraging AI to doing some management and AI and management, but we’re trying to build that into data dive, right. So how do we build tools that are combination. And the way I related is this. And I know it’s a little off topic, but the way I related is this I’ve been learning chess like I’ve just been as a way to like separate. I’ve been really trying to get good at chess. And there’s a, the smartest engine right now for chess is not fully AI, because the I was like, the big thing for the last 20 years on like, how can an AI beat, you know, the greatest player in the world, the best one on the market right now is called Stockfish. And Stockfish is a combination of rules and AI.
Brandon Young 00:32:00  And I feel like that’s the way that ads management needs to be as well, where there’s an algorithm that runs and then at some point it needs to check with AI to get an answer on something. And once it gets that answer from AI, it knows what algorithm to run next. And so that’s kind of what we’re building is. But everything needs to have AI. It’s going to make your team more efficient. It’s going to make your products better. It’s going to make your designs better. It’s going to improve your conversion rates. So this wouldn’t be a complete podcast without saying what levers are we pulling? It’s getting really good at.
Josh Hadley 00:32:24  I love it, Love it. Brennan. Well, we’re going to have to do a part two later on, but this has been super enlightening. Brennan. As we wrap things up, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. Number one, as you as a brand owner, no matter what level of business you are at right now, your most important thing to do is to manage by leading indicators.
Josh Hadley 00:32:48  And so what you need to focus on is what are the leading indicators that will lead to future profits and revenue in the business.
Brandon Young 00:32:56  Let’s rephrase that real quick Josh as leading actions.
Josh Hadley 00:32:59  Even better.
Brandon Young 00:33:00  Yeah. Because that way that way it’s in the term that you’re actually doing something that you need to be doing and measuring every single day that will result in that lagging metric.
Brandon Young 00:33:11  Yeah.
Josh Hadley 00:33:11  You’re exactly right. And Brandon, one of the things I have right in front of my desk every single day is what am I doing every day to touch my three biggest priorities in the business? What am I doing as leading actions? I love that leading actions that I know if I just keep doing this every single day, these will lead to positive profit or revenue in the future. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is you’ve got to differentiate yourself in the market and your products. And Brandon gave us some great ideas, whether that be licensing, going to the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas and actually creating a licensing deal right for your products, or is it creating IP, whether it be design patterns or utility patterns for your product, that expand that moat around your products, that allow you to have a longer kind of, I guess, growth cycle or product life cycle on Amazon to be able to hedge against yourself.
Josh Hadley 00:34:01  So differentiation and you talked about utilizing AI as well and being proactive there. I think that that that’s been something that a lot of people have neglected up until now. And I think that’s only going to become more important over the next 5 to 10 years. And I would also say that that is our biggest competitive advantage, us as US based sellers, we have the best competitive advantage compared to our overseas competitors because we know what’s trending in the market. We know what the end customer wants. We know how to speak to them. So can we outinnovate the competition. That’s how you win. My final action item is hiring really good talent. And as you mentioned, Brandon, in order to be able to scale, if you just hire $2, $3, $4 an hour Vas because you’re like, oh, they’re just super cheap, this is great. Guess what happens? You will eventually hit 5 or 7 million where that team. Now some of those guys need to be able to level up into leadership roles, but they don’t have the skill sets to be able to do so.
Josh Hadley 00:34:50  And guess what you have to do? You basically have to pull it all back down to the studs and rebuild that house and that foundation all over again. And so one of my biggest hacks is like, if you focus and you’re willing to invest in really good talent up front, so much so that you say, all right, yeah, I’m hiring you for this VA role, but I know you’ve got a lot more potential in you. Those are the type of candidates that you want to bring in to your team. Brandon, anything you think I missed here?
Brandon Young 00:35:13  No, man. I think that you’re an expert at the hiring and training and the advantage that you have with manufacturing in the US. I think that if you that’s a huge thing for people to understand around how long is your capital tied up? How do you manage your supply chain if you’ve got suppliers in the US diversifying into the US? When possible, is good. Looking for products that are done here can be really good. but hiring and training the right people and getting them leveled up is, the biggest bottleneck that I see.
Brandon Young 00:35:37  Most, large brands and even agencies run into. So even the agencies are great when it’s, one employees one through five. And when you’re, like one of the first brands into an agency, it’s usually the head of the agency. That’s really good. The face of the agency, they do, they deliver great work. They know what they’re doing. But then it’s like employee 15 and brand number 25 really struggle, right? Because they they need the right processes and systems to teach them how to properly do that thing that they’re doing. yeah. I think that, you know, the same reason that we hit walls at 5 million and at 20 million is the same reason that you run into you hit walls with an agency as well. So it’s people, it’s talent, it’s processes, it’s training. And if you’re not good at it yourself to begin with, even if you hate doing it, you’re not going to be able to hire and train the right people to do it. So you’ve You’ve got to find the right experts and learn from them and and bring in the right coaches.
Brandon Young 00:36:26  And then that’s the way that you’re going to able to grow this brand to the next level.
Josh Hadley 00:36:28  So yeah I mean well well said. They’re that’s why I think like as business owners you need to make the conscious decision. And I hope that through this conversation you’ve been able to see like what it takes in order to scale to that next level requires management. It requires operationalizing things and creating systems and processes in your business. If that’s not you and you’re like, I don’t like that. I don’t want to hire and manage staff, that’s fine. But you’ve got to go find some avenues to where you can make as much money as you can with, with yourself. Right. And, and, and know that and be happy with that constraint. But I think in these physical products, brands like name one nine figure company that’s done with the one founder in in a VA like I haven’t heard of that yet. Maybe I will change that in the coming five years, but maybe.
Brandon Young 00:37:09  I will do it by itself.
Josh Hadley 00:37:10  Maybe I has its own brand, right? So here are the three final questions I ask each guess. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Brandon Young 00:37:20  Oh, man. I think, it’d be a combination of all the different business management books that I’ve read. So, whether it’s, for four disciplines of execution, or, you know, yeah, it’s. Yeah. Measure what matters. Scaling up. I think that at the end of the day, interactions on that list as well. All of these systems call it something different, but it’s all exactly what we were talking about today. And, the combination of those things, which is you, you figure out what lever to pull, you set a goal, and then you work backwards from that goal. So it’s learning how to work backwards into and boil down what your goal is. What are the drivers and causes to that, that for that goal. And then what are the leading activities required to move the needle towards achieving that goal.
Brandon Young 00:38:10  And so whether it’s one of those systems that you follow, whether it’s, you know, OKRs or, you know, EOS or whatever it is you’re going to have to learn how to run and operate your business using those same, methodologies. And so I think it’s a combination of all those. And it was interesting by the second and third book, I’m like, oh, it’s all the same shit. It’s just telling it a different way and it’s just calling it something different. And all of them are trying to sell you a coaching program, I think. So, like, you know, at the end of the day, they just want to kind of make it their own so they can sell you their coaches. But, you know, I was like, maybe they’re on to something. If all of these giant companies have been formed and grown and scaled using these systems, there’s there’s something there. And it’s been a big unlock for us to be able to run and operate the three businesses that we have and to scale them the way we have.
Josh Hadley 00:38:52  Yeah, I love that. Well, I think you said that perfectly well. There’s lots of different books there, but it’s all about creating that management, that operating system in the business branding. Question number two what’s your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?
Brandon Young 00:39:05  I think that the ChatGPT prompt that is most underutilized is to tell it to go learn about a few things before you actually ask it for an answer.
Brandon Young 00:39:12  Tell me more.
Brandon Young 00:39:13  So whenever I want to learn something or want it to tell me about something, or give me some advice on something. I ask it to go learn about it or several things first. And it goes and does research and gives me a report on that thing that learned, and then it’s better equipped to answer that question. So it’s basically, you know, training the model first before you really rely on the answer, because the answer is only going to be you don’t know what what knowledge base it has, but you want it to actually have that answer before you, you know, have that knowledge before it answers.
Brandon Young 00:39:41  so yeah, I think it’s just more around a general idea of how to talk to it. And then I love Midjourney, I love designing with Midjourney. I love getting ideas for Midjourney around concepts and ideas and and characters and toys and things that I want to do. So I love Midjourney.
Josh Hadley 00:39:54  I love it, and I love that you’re telling it to go learn. it is as simple. It’s like if you just treat it to garbage in, garbage out, that’s all you’re going to get. So do the extra step there with ChatGPT. All right, Brandon, final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following, and why.
Brandon Young 00:40:09  Are they.
Brandon Young 00:40:09  Should be following you, man? so I think that there are a few guys out there that really know their stuff. I mean, it all depends on which expert level of expertise or what you want them to do. I love how Kevin King is always trying to find new things and avenues and things that he’s doing.
Brandon Young 00:40:22  Hermosa is great for just business management practices and really just like a no bullshit way of telling you how to, like, focus on the things you need to focus on. But it’s not necessarily e-commerce. yeah. I mean, from an ecommerce perspective, guys that are out there putting out content. Rita, Rita’s got a great, eye newsletter. That’s fantastic if you’re not in that one. Kevin King’s newsletters. Fantastic. follow also, Destiney Wilson from Better Media. Her her, posts on LinkedIn are fantastic. Yeah. So many great people in our space that really add value that know what they’re doing. yeah. That we know and love and respect.
Josh Hadley 00:40:59  Echo all of those sentiments. And we’ve had Rita, Kevin and Destiny on the show. So go back and pull up those episodes because they definitely know what they’re.
Brandon Young 00:41:06  Talking the best. Yeah, absolutely.
Josh Hadley 00:41:08  Brandon, this has been a lot of fun. If people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about data dive stellar systems.
Josh Hadley 00:41:12  How can people find you?
Brandon Young 00:41:14  Yeah, I mean, data dive. You can get a free 15 days, I think, using it and maybe even get a free coaching session. If you guys are already doing 6 or 7 figures, I’ll give you a full month of it to bring over. and and to give it a try. I think our, our keyword tracker is the best in the market. I think by the time this episode airs, we will have search query, performance data integrated at the keyword level in your in your keyword tracker, which no one else does. We’re also the first to bring in impression share as well. so I think that, you know, try data dive. It’s, you know, I always tell people it’s the better, newer version of helium ten. So if you’re using helium ten, you don’t need to anymore. come come over to Data Dive. Also, if, if you want to learn about stellar systems like we’re training, we have a new program starting where we’re going to be training your ads person.
Brandon Young 00:41:54  So it’s a PPC manager training for the first time, 12 week program, certificate program. Put your people into it. They will get you as an employer will get a initial assessment, midterm progress reports and a final exam. They you will know all the strengths and weaknesses as we try to level up your PPC people. That starts in April. We have very limited seats there and then we’ve got Camp Ecom. Bring your team to camp. Come learn from one of the two tracks. Hopefully Josh is speaking at it again. He’s an alum of it and, you know, can’t become.com. We will be at an all inclusive resort in Cancun, where you have two tracks. You’ve got your, pre-launch and post-launch, two full days of working in your business. So this isn’t a typical, workshop where or conference where people are just talking at you from stage. It is you actually working in your business while someone’s teaching you from stage to fill out an SOP. Go do something in your business, level up, bring your team to it and level them up while you’re at it.
Brandon Young 00:42:44  And then we have an executive day. So instead of doing three tracks because the executives, the feedback we got from the executives that they wanted to do the tactical at the same time. So we actually have the first day as the executive day, you have to be doing at least seven figures. And, that’s going to be the first day of learning how to hire, train, work backwards, scale your business. All the things we talked about today that Josh always talks about, spend time around other amazing, successful entrepreneurs for a few days in Paradise at camp Aecom.
Josh Hadley 00:43:08  Love it Brandon. So much value share today. Thanks so much for your time today.
Brandon Young 00:43:12  Appreciate you man. looking forward to seeing you again soon.