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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley speaks with Shinghi Detlefsen, Amazon expert and founder of the American E-commerce Business Alliance. Shinghi discusses the regulatory disadvantages U.S. sellers face against foreign competitors, explains his data-driven approach to maximizing Amazon ad spend using customer lifetime value metrics, and emphasizes building authentic brands over chasing short-term tactics. The conversation also covers AI’s practical role in e-commerce, financial discipline, and the importance of staying focused on core business fundamentals rather than distractions.

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

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction and Setting the Stage
Podcast intro, host and guest introductions, and overview of the episode’s focus on e-commerce scaling and Amazon.

00:02:38 The ABA and Regulatory Disadvantages for US Sellers
Shinghi explains the American E-commerce Business Alliance and the regulatory/tax advantages foreign sellers have on Amazon.

00:07:06 How to Get Involved with ABA and the Bigger Picture
Discussion on actionable steps for US sellers to support ABA and why regulatory change matters more than minor Amazon policy changes.

00:08:18 The Consequences of Losing US Brands and Manufacturing
Explains the broader economic risks if US brands and manufacturing are lost to foreign competitors.

00:10:04 Doubling Amazon Ad Spend Profitably
Shinghi shares how he doubled Amazon ad spend without losing profitability, counter to common industry trends.

00:11:19 Why Amazon Remains the Best Channel
Discussion on consumer shopping behavior and why Amazon is still the dominant platform for most buyers.

00:12:37 Optimizing Ad Spend with Customer Analytics
Explains using data to determine optimal ad spend, focusing on maximizing 12-month contribution profit per customer.

00:15:32 Customer Lifetime Value and Profitability Metrics
How to track and use LTV and lifetime profit on Amazon, and why these metrics matter more than ACoS/TACoS.

00:17:23 External Traffic and Meta Ads Direct to Amazon
Strategy of sending Meta (Facebook/Instagram) ad traffic directly to Amazon product pages for better results.

00:19:18 Brand Building vs. Short-Term Hacks
Why building a real brand with solid fundamentals outperforms chasing short-term hacks or black-hat tactics.

00:20:14 Mindset Shift: From Transactional to Lifetime Value
Encourages Amazon sellers to focus on CAC:LTV ratios and long-term customer value, not just single-sale profits.

00:22:48 Education and Data-Driven Decision Making
Importance of learning business fundamentals and using customer analytics to drive growth.

00:24:25 Amazon Fee Increases and the Real Root Problem
Why blaming Amazon for fee increases misses the point; the real issue is regulatory imbalance with foreign sellers.

00:28:43 Brand Power and Pricing Flexibility
How having a strong brand allows for price increases and resilience against Amazon’s changing policies.

00:29:40 AI in E-commerce: Hype vs. Reality
Discussion on the current state of AI in e-commerce, what’s real, what’s hype, and where to focus your time.

00:30:07 Build vs. Buy: SaaS, AI Tools, and Time Value
Pros and cons of building your own tools with AI vs. paying for SaaS; focus on time value and maintenance.

00:33:51 Where AI Delivers the Most Value
AI’s best use is interpreting large data sets, not replacing complex SaaS or business processes.

00:35:27 Avoiding FOMO and Focusing on High-Value Tasks
Advice to avoid distraction from shiny new tools and focus on automating admin tasks to free up time for growth.

00:39:01 SaaS Innovation and Staying Ahead
Why SaaS companies will quickly catch up to DIY solutions, and the importance of focusing on your core business.

00:40:07 Final Thoughts: Build a Brand and Give Back
Encouragement to build a real brand, take care of customers, and use success to contribute positively to the world.

00:40:39 Three Action Items for E-commerce Success
Host summarizes three key takeaways: fight for a fair marketplace, build a real brand, and avoid distractions.

00:44:40 The Myth of Constant Product Launches
Challenges the idea that always launching new products is the best growth strategy; focus on bestsellers and distribution.

00:46:39 Risk Management and Financial Advice
Advice on managing risk by investing conservatively outside the business and building a financial safety net.

00:48:03 The Value of Financial Security for Better Decisions
How having a financial cushion leads to better business decisions and peace of mind.

00:48:42 Rapid-Fire Questions: Book, AI Tool, and E-comm Leader
Shinghi shares his favorite business principle, AI tool (Claude), and recommends following Logan from Physician’s Choice.

00:50:10 Outro and Contact Information
How to follow Shinghi, closing remarks, and end of the episode.

Tools and Websites
“American E-commerce Business Alliance (AEBA)“: “00:02:38”
“ExpandFi“: “00:01:46”
“Claude Code“: “00:49:09″Books
“The E-Myth (by Michael Gerber)“: “00:00:53″Notable Mentions
“Logan from Physician’s Choice“: “00:49:38”

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:

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:00:00  You have to get over this obsession that people are not obsessed with your brand as much as you want them to be. They want they want to go to one place, add a bunch of stuff to cart and check out. That’s what they want to do. Amazon is so good at this.

MC 00:00:11  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 00:00:25  What if the real reason you’re stuck at seven figures isn’t just your product, your ads, or your traffic? What if it’s your financial visibility, your operating system, and how you’re actually running the business behind the scenes? Well, today’s guest has a fully functioning, really well optimized business, and he’s going to be sharing exactly what he’s doing in his own brand to have his success. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. 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.

Josh Hadley 00:00:53  I bring you the unfiltered conversations with some of the smartest minds in e-commerce. Past guests include Ezra Firestone, Kevin King, and Michael Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today, we’ve got a very special guest joining us who is somebody who truly sits at the intersection of operator, strategist and financial thinker. I’m excited to welcome Shinghi Detlefsen, one of the founders of the American E-commerce Business Alliance, the AEBA, who is fighting for a fair and free marketplace, the CEO and co-founder of ExpandFi, and the president of Wholesome Story, and one of the most successful supplement brands on Amazon. Shinghi isn’t just another SaaS founder, he’s actually a true operator who has built, scaled, and optimized real brands at a high level. His expertise goes deep into what really drives sustainable growth. So if you’re serious about turning your business into a scalable and sellable asset, today is going to be a powerful conversation. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Shinghi.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:01:46  Thanks for having me, Josh. Happy to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:01:47  Yeah, I’m actually super happy to have you on the show here, because I saw your presentation at the Ms. Inspire event here a few months back and loved everything that you were talking about. The topic at that time was all about AI, and we’ll dabble into AI. But like, you’ve got your hands into so many different things and you’ve got a really good pulse on what’s happening in the e-commerce space, the Amazon Space as a whole, and e-commerce broadly. So I’m super excited to dive into that in. Like when we dive into that, I think the first thing I want you to talk about is like the ABA, like explain to sellers like what? That is why that’s so important. Because I honestly feel like if there’s one message that I want the listeners to take away today, it’s exactly this alliance that you guys have created that I think is about to like, if there’s a hack that people should implement, it’s creating a fair and free marketplace. So tell me more about that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:02:38  Yeah.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:02:38  So it’s the American E-commerce Business Alliance, ABA is the website for it. And it all started end of 2024. You know, for a long time supplements was a category that was basically US based sellers like somehow foreign sellers get out. And at the end of 2020, we started seeing like a massive flood of foreign sellers, mainly Chinese, coming into supplements. And for the first time I could see this is what everyone else has been dealing with. And so it opened my eyes to the point where, like, I wanted to learn more about this and I was like, okay, so why are these sellers able to sell so cheaply? Some of them fake products, obviously. So like, you know, cogs go to very low. But the more and more I dug into it and I started digging it with like multiple people from AKS and from MDS and from like all over. What we realized was they don’t have for the same good. Let’s say you buy something from China. They have the same cogs as you.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:03:29  They do not have a cost of good advantage unless they’re the manufacturer. And there might be something better. But even manufacturing like margins are generally like 10%. So it’s like going to be like $3 or 330, like it’s not breaking the bank. And the advantage that they have against you in your own country, in the United States of America, is a regulatory advantage. And that regulatory advantage is when you’re competing with you versus Chinese seller, that Chinese seller does not have to pay taxes on the profits it makes in the United States. It does not need to have a US bank account. It does not need to have insurance for its company, does not have legal liability for its company. So you put all of those things in, you know, against head to head, like that’s like a 40 to 50% advantage against a US company in the United States of America. That is like an instrument right there. Yeah. Yeah. Like so that is the world that we in e-commerce accept. And Josh, you and I were chatting just quickly here for the podcast.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:04:24  And like, you know, Amazon is changing the way it’s charging ads now. And it’s going to move away from credit cards and go to Bill. And everyone’s up in arms. Oh my goodness. This is the end of the world. We need to revolt. We need to like group together and fight back. And that’s going to have a less than 1% impact on the total business. What I’m talking about is a fundamental change that could potentially allow all of us to actually compete in our own country on a fair and level playing field, allowing you to double your business, get reduce all this unfair competition from China and other places. And everyone’s like, man. Yeah, I want my credit card points. So like, the mindset of so many e-commerce sellers is like they fight on these little tiny pieces and they forget the bigger picture here. And the beautiful thing of like what we’ve done in all the research that we’ve done. Like, you know, I’ve met with Representative Steve Scalise, I’ve met with Senator Rick Scott.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:05:08  I’ve met with Senator Ted Budd. I’ve met with Ambassador Greer. I’ve met with, like, all of these politicians about this issue. Everyone’s on board, but it doesn’t work until you have, like a full coalition, a lobbying firm to push this forward. And what we’re advocating for is, you know, funny enough, like the laws exist today, they just need to be enforced. There’s a tax treaty that occurs, but then there’s also there was another law passed during Trump’s first term, which is the TMK or something like that. And it’s basically all there on a silver platter. We just need to say, hey, Congress, can you please start enforcing this? And the enforcement would say that if you have permanent, established United States, if you’re using US infrastructure like FBA and Amazon ads and customer service from Amazon, you have permanent United States. are subject to U.S. income taxes are subject to registration. Boom. We live in a free and fair marketplace. So like that’s the real fight that I think that everyone should be working on together.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:05:59  And I can’t force people to do that. But we have a great website. We have incredible information on that site. I would recommend people just sign up. You don’t even need to pay anything right now. But just like at least put your name on it and you can do it anonymously too if you’re scared. But yeah, that’s a key thing. It all comes back down to it’s like I’m the type of person that I take control of my destiny. Like I’m not one to say like someone else will do. It’s like, no, like you have to do it right? Like, I’m a big like, my favorite was like, do something. You know, you’re complaining. People complain all the time about Amazon. Do something about it. What are you doing about it? Complain is not going to do anything. Do something. Offer a solution, not just state the problem. So yeah, it’s been it’s been quite fun. It’s been rather interesting to like the whole political sphere, the whole political world.

Josh Hadley 00:06:41  That’s a whole other business in and of itself.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:06:43  Yeah. It is, you know, and it’s it’s both like I remember I had the observation that like part of the reason why China can win economically or in so many different ways is because it’s a uni party dictatorship, right, where they can point in a direction and say, we’re moving this direction for ten years, we can barely move in one direction for like six months. And we just have constant infighting United States against both parties. And like at the end of the day, we get nothing done.

Josh Hadley 00:07:06  If if people are like listening to this and they’re like, yeah, totally agree. I definitely want to, you know, would love to fight for a free marketplace. What’s the best way for people to get involved? Right. Yeah, they can put their email in there. But like, what else needs to be done? Because I do think that like this fundamental shift like this is something that could easily double your business. And I think you could easily see, like a lot of overseas sellers go to the wayside almost overnight because of the new regulations that just make it fair.

Josh Hadley 00:07:33  It’s the same thing that we all have to do here in the US. Like, why do they get a bypass that so what can people actually do right now.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:07:39  So I really it is like sign that pledge form. And if you’re really serious about it, put money, put your money where your mouth is. Right. Like nobody’s making money off of this, right? Like, you know, I run multiple businesses. I don’t need more money. I care about this. As a matter of fact. Right. A matter of like the United States of America in the future for our jobs. Like on the website, we have a really good picture that would paint words like we lost manufacturing to China and to other countries. We’re now we’re losing both retailers like Teemu and TikTok. Shop coming on TikTok is not about the United States, but she and all of these foreign retailers are not coming into the United States, and they’re competing against Amazon and Walmart and all these other ones. But at the same time, we’re also losing brands.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:08:18  So like market dominance on Amazon is majority Chinese. So when you start losing brands, who’s going to buy from us? Manufacturing like that is like the like you can’t restart US manufacturing because Chinese brands will never buy from US manufacturing. They’re going to go buy from Chinese manufacturer. So if you lose this you lose the ability to restart US manufacturing as well. And once you do that then now our complete supply chain is owned by foreign companies. Manufacturing is owned. The retailers are owned. The brands are like the US becomes an economy that exports cash and nothing else on the retail physical product side. So yeah, like, oh, I’m so worried about my credit cards. Do something dude. Do something that’s like actually like legit going to change your business, not worry about your credit card points. Yeah, I’m sad about credit.

Josh Hadley 00:08:59  Well said, well said.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:09:01  Do something about it. So yeah. Sign the pledge, put your money where your mouth is and then get involved. Like, we all have a local senator and a local representative.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:09:09  And that’s the beautiful thing about America. Call them. Be like, hey, I’m a part of this group. I want you to look at this website, and I want you to help me fix this problem for my business and my peers. Because otherwise, if we don’t, we’re losing. And there’s no, like, coming back at the end of the day there. And also, the bigger these Chinese companies get yet, yes, they will start playing fair. They will abide by US tax law. But you can’t. If you don’t do it now, you’re going to lose the whole game very quickly. That’s basically so.

Josh Hadley 00:09:35  Fantastic. Well, thanks for your efforts there, Shinghi. So love everything you’re doing. Let’s turn our attention to some really interesting things that you’re doing in your own business. Before we hit the record button, you shared with me how you have doubled your ad spend on Amazon without decreasing your overall profitability and, you know, losing your shorts there where most people. The overall conversation I hear is like everybody’s reducing ad spend and trying to move off of Amazon and you’re doubling down almost on Amazon and even more ad spend.

Josh Hadley 00:10:04  So tell me why. And what kind of effect have has that had on your business? And how in the world are you doubling ads been? Or are you just increasing your CPCs and showing up top of search everywhere? What are you doing?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:10:15  All right, so for for number one I’m a giant bull for Amazon. You know. So my background I used to work at Amazon I worked there 2014 to 2020. I started in like retails and office products ended in Prime Video on the product management side of things. And I loved my time at Amazon the first year that I was there, when I walked in the door in like my first couple of weeks, I was like, there’s no way I’m here more than a year. I’m out of here. This environment is too stressful. It’s like it’s too much work for less pay than you could get at other tech companies in the rest, and you become addicted to it because you are constantly learning and you’re learning how to like, really like level up yourself, level up your writing the way you articulate things, the way you have ideas, and the way you map out your I mean, that’s Jeff Bezos whole PR FAQ, press release, FAQ process is refining ideas.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:11:01  Lo and behold, I end up there six years and I leave Amazon with my dream. I had my dream job at Amazon. I wrote my own PR FAQ, I had a team funded and I left it for my dream life with my companies and the rest. But coming back to why I’m an Amazon bull. Where do people like to shop? Josh, where do you like to shop?

Josh Hadley 00:11:19  Yeah, I mean, Amazon is my go to. I hate going to the store. Yeah, you absolutely hate it. I never go.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:11:24  And do you want like say, you know, like people you have to get over this obsession that people are not obsessed with your brand as much as you want them to be. They want they want to go to one place, add a bunch of stuff to cart and check out. That’s what they want to do. Amazon is so good at this. Like so like, you know, 2020 2021. I launched our Shopify site. This was the time when everyone was like, yo, you got to own your customer.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:11:45  You got to bring them to your website. You know, everyone was doing these hacks to try and get their emails and like, postcards and sending them traffic to their Shopify site. You know, I realized at the end of the day, people like to shop where they like to shop and they like to shop on Amazon. So why are you trying to do something that’s counterintuitive to the way they’re doing it, and they like it? So I am a mega bull on Amazon, especially in health and like health care and like supplement spaces. Like there’s not more Walgreens opening. There’s not more CVS opening. It’s really Amazon. Amazon’s taking market share and Walmart too and the rest and target.com. So on the ad side so like I view Amazon is like bottom of funnel right. And you most Amazon sellers like what PPC is is bottom funnel marketing. You sit there with your mouth open and people fall into it. And you can choose to follow like a couple different strategies. Like the first one is like, hey, if you’re ranking number 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 in organic space, you should kill ads.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:12:37  Like that’s a common thing. that’s a bad idea, but it was a bad idea for my brain because you are allowing competitors to sneak in and take those slots. Right. So now you’re losing market share because you heard on a hack that like that’s what everyone’s doing. So my whole journey with ify has been let me answer this single question. Can I spend more to acquire a customer, or can I spend less to acquire a customer? And then following on that if I spend more? What’s the diminishing return of new customers that I get? And if I want to optimize for 12 month contribution profit, where should I be on my cap spend? So in January we finally got there. Like we launched what we call the spend curve to be able to tell you precisely for each product in each sales channel where you are today. This is your cap today. And whether or not you should spend more or you should spend less. And the goal is you want to get to this equilibrium where you’re spending at the amount where you’re maximizing 12 month contribution profit for your business.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:13:30  And this works for like CPG, your products obviously that of LTV. If you’re a one time purchase man you better get KAC right. Because if you don’t, you are never making money back from customers. So the way I treat cash in my mind and with all of this stuff is that cash is a sunk cost on a customer that you never recover or you you can recover, but it’s sunk. That is a permanent it is like Cogs for that customer. And so if your cash is too high, you’re going to be working for the rest of your lifetime with that customer trying to just receive your cash back. And you need to treat your company and your business as like you need to have this mindset that you have. What is equivalent to is like you’re investing in the S&P 500, so a dollar into ad spend is equivalent to putting a dollar into the S&P 500. The S&P 500 can net you like you know a good year 10%, 8%, right 4% on average. Your business has the potential to give you 250% returns.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:14:18  And people are saying they should spend less. It’s like right there like they’re trying to find all these like other shiny objects where they’re like, oh man, this investment gets me 15%, you know, year end, like, well, your business can get you more. And so it’s treating your company and your products and your ad spend as an investment for long term return. So what we discovered with our product set was that like we spent curve was just saying, dude, you should be spending 50% more. And then we spent 50% more. And the spend curve is like just pegged. Spend more. Keep spending more. And what we find is like we’re spending more and we’re spending more and spending more on our calc is almost like flat. Like our calc is increasing a little bit, but not much. And like, slowly it starts coming down from the 50% to spend 20% more. And, you know, we were leaving so much money on the table and we were allowing like ourselves, to lose market share and all this other stuff that I like.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:15:05  I look back on this now and I’m just like, oh my God, I wish I we were able to develop this earlier. But it was a culmination of five years of work for expanded to be able to get to this point. Like that’s how difficult it was.

Josh Hadley 00:15:15  yeah. And is this like, are you trying to bring in like Shopify revenue as well, or is this are you just looking at like optimizing the Amazon funnel itself? Because I know Amazon doesn’t like share a lot of like customer details. So like how are you getting the actual true LTV of a customer on Amazon?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:15:32  Well, Amazon lets you know about a customer, but they’re anonymized so you can track LTV on Amazon really easily. It’s just buyer email and fulfillment report, but you have to make the data useful, right? So like what we’ve done in Spotify is like our tool is not a sales tool. Like we don’t report on sales. It is a customer analytics tool. So all of our sales are built from customers, which means that you now understand at the customer level what the impact of advertising is, what the impact of promotions are, what the impact of product mix is with the impact of like LTV and then a metric we call lifetime profit.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:16:07  So you have lifetime value, which is effect on revenue. The customer and you have lifetime profit, which is a lifetime contribution profit of the customer. And the law of averages basically state that like once you know the average from a cohort and you have a good average like history, right, like say like 12 months or 18 months, you can generally predict that to be true in the future. And that’s where like that’s where you can maximize contribution profit. At the 12 month mark, you can say, hey, a customer on average who buys this product has this average 12 month contribution profit, which means that if you get more of them, you increase that and then on and on and on. Josh but like.

Josh Hadley 00:16:34  Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:16:37  Yeah. At the end of the day, the way it works is you can think of as like when you increase cap, you’re decreasing the average contribution margin and profit of a customer because it’s a sunk cost. Right? Cap goes up, their margin goes down.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:16:48  But if you get more customers, more customers times less of an average dollar amount, you’re still better net. So you’re maximizing for this like slight decrease for an increase in customers. And boom, your business is now actually optimized for for Cat and for advertisers. Yeah. So we did this experiment. You know, January we were spending $100,000 a month or $300,000 a month in March, and probably April will be 400,000 or something like that. And our business has never been better like I am. Yeah, I thought I didn’t have the leverage to grow our business. And then we took a step back and like we realized we actually do.

Josh Hadley 00:17:21  A this is fantastic, I love.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:17:23  It. Yeah. The second piece relative is we’re driving external traffic directly to Amazon. Again, this is where so many people are so focused on are meta needs to go to Shopify and then I’ll take the halo for now, baby. We’re going straight to Amazon. Our meta go straight to our product page.

Josh Hadley 00:17:36  So what does that look like? Like what are you running on meta.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:17:39  Then we’re running just ads that are like for our customer base, basically middle top of the funnel directly to Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:17:45  That’s like with a discount code. Anything like what’s the call to action call that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:17:50  Just buy.

Josh Hadley 00:17:50  It. Isn’t that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:17:51  Yeah. That’s it. You know and again like every brand is different. We have a unique positioning in our brand. We’re best like number one and all this other stuff. So like that helps a lot obviously. But really it’s like, you know I think when an issue that people have when they’re advertising they go off Amazon is they’re like they’re going from bottom of the funnel to top of the funnel, which is a big problem because now you have to convince random strangers to buy your products. Whereas if you go bottom of the phone in the middle of the funnel, you’re convincing product and solution aware people about your product. Much easier, much higher efficiency. And then once you tap that out, then you go top.

Josh Hadley 00:18:23  How are you finding? How are you finding the middle of the funnel then on meta like what’s your segmentation and how are you targeting those customers?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:18:30  It’s just mostly I mean, you just go for keywords, right? Meta’s targeting is also getting better.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:18:33  So just talk about like the keywords of your products. Right. And so like meta will pick that up like group discussions and messaging and like all over the place. Right. Even like Facebook Marketplace is just a giant interest gatherer to be honest. That’s all it is. Right. Like I, I browse marketplace more than I browse Facebook just because it’s fun. Right? But but meta then knows exactly the kind of things that I’m interested in buying right now. And they do a good job on the retargeting side. Yeah. I mean, that’s like, yeah, that’s the ad. It’s not I don’t know if it’s like I being an MDS for so long now. Like, man, there are everyone’s wants to have to grow their business. At the end of the day it’s like there is no half like you. If you want to build a brand, you have to follow all of the things that you need to do to build a brand. Right. Like if you cheat and lie and cut corners, you’re going to get caught one day.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:19:18  Whether it’s by your customers, by your reviews, by a regulatory authority, like whatever it is. Like that’s not building a brand and you’re taking a shortcut to nothing. So my favorite advice that I ever got with e-commerce was that you made 20% of your money running the business. You make 80% of what you sell. But if you don’t run a good business, you can’t sell it, you know? So like in supplements is a good example where a lot of people are making all these like disease claims, they’re really going overboard. You know, they’re allowing their affiliates to say whatever they want just to get the sale. Those brands are worthless. $0. Nobody will touch them. Because the second you have to think about liability and the second, a big brand buys one of these smaller brands, they inherit liability and they’re not going to touch it. Because now lawyers look at that and be like, oh, hello. You know, you have a lot bigger pockets in the previous owner and I want some.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:20:02  So all of this stuff like you really have to focus on building a brand. Go back to basics, Josh. People price, product promotion, all of that stuff. Like the P’s of marketing, key things.

Josh Hadley 00:20:14  The things that we learned in that college marketing class where you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever that is. But it makes sense. Here’s what I love that you touched on too many. So if we talk about like CCaC and LTV to somebody that started their e-commerce journey on Shopify, those are their metrics that they live and die by, right? Like that is like that’s what they are focused on on a day in, day out. What’s my kak today? Whereas on Amazon we’re just like, what’s my ACOs? What’s my tacos? And it’s like, okay, that’s fine, but only if you’re looking at just like bottom of the funnel. What’s my profit that I acquired from this customer? And what you’ve done is you’ve basically said like, let’s go back to the real business principles.

Josh Hadley 00:20:53  And this is the beauty of business. It’s all about your kak to customer lifetime value ratio period. And in the e-commerce space, if you can get a 3 to 1 ratio, meaning your customer lifetime value is above three to what you spend to acquire that customer. Unless you have like exorbitant, you know, cogs like you’re almost printing cash at a 3 to 1 ratio. And so that’s like the holy grail that you’re focused on day in and day out on the e-commerce side. And so the Amazon sellers listening to this that are Amazon first. Like they’re like that I think is like the biggest like mindset shift that people need to experience is that it’s not just about like, how much profit did I make from this one sell? It’s, well, what if this is the first product that they buy in a whole series of products, or they now are on my subscribe and save. So now this is a returning customer every month or two months, etc.. So I love what you did with expand.

Josh Hadley 00:21:46  If I to actually visualize that data, make the business decision to say like, hey, we can just acquire even more customers. My margin might compress a little bit, but I went from $1 million net to $2 million net just by increasing my ad spend. So I think that is super, super valuable that more people need to listen and actually pay attention to that. Because you’re right, it’s not the shiny hacks that’s like, that’s what people love. And they’re craving it. Yeah, they’re always listening to like the latest webinar whatever for the hack, the easy thing when it’s like, just go back to building a real system, a real business that is built upon really good financial fundamentals and an actual like quality product and build a true brand, which means you’re doing stuff outside of Amazon, right? If you’re just building inside Amazon Silo, you don’t have a brand because the people shopping on Amazon, even myself included, they’re not really brand loyal. They’re just looking for the thing that they can get tomorrow that fits.

Josh Hadley 00:22:37  The only qualification I use is I look at who the seller is of record, and I try to buy as many things from us sellers as I possibly can when I’m on Amazon. So yeah, anything else to add on that?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:22:48  Well, it’s like, you know, with expanded too. Like we you know, we’re probably for Amazon. We’re definitely market leader in terms of like customer analytics and the rest. But so much of my job is literally educating people on how to think about it. Right. And that is like, again, a lot of people come in and they have like data to change their business, but they’re not spending the time to actually go and learn on why it’s important. And like you, maybe it comes down back to like me and having to do that. But like you, brand owners need to sit down and go take a class on how to operate e-commerce or how to think about customers, how to think about retention, how to think about lifetime value and lifetime profit and contribution.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:23:24  Profit margin like these are all the things that people should be spending their time on. Not vibe coding, some SaaS or like whatever. Like no, go sit there in a conversation with you and your data and just talk to AI about like, hey, help me understand this. Like, why is this important? How is it? Because once you like, once it clicks through, the brains that get it are the brands that are winning. That is a fact. The brands that get this like they understand customers, they understand cap. They understand lifetime value. They understand profit winners. Easy winners. The brands that don’t. Not winning. Or by some luck, they’re winning.

Josh Hadley 00:23:53  So it’s most people are so focused on just like first purchase transaction. Right. And that’s where people get on this slippery slope where it’s like, well my competitor undercut me on price. So now I just need to be like, I need to be a buck lower now, right? And it’s like, now you’re playing the stupid game of just like driving down prices where everybody loses when you do this and you’re just worried about like your profit on one transaction, but you’re not looking at your brand from a holistic point, which let’s talk about this real quick, which is Amazon will continue to increase their FBA fees.

Josh Hadley 00:24:25  There’s a new fuel surcharge once again. And guess what? Will that ever be repealed? No, probably. Most likely not once. Once Amazon adds on it tax on a fee that’s never going away. So if your strategy on Amazon is like, I play the low price game and I just want to win the customer and I just got to acquire this. Like I just got to win the transaction and that’s it. If that’s where your brand ends, I’m sorry. Like your days are numbered on Amazon, you may be able to move volumes of products. But like when Amazon changes your payout timeline, cash flow gets really constrained, especially when you’re operating in really slim margins. In addition to that, you can’t absorb these increases in FBA fees. And so like you just get eaten away slowly time after time, whereas create a real brand. And when you have a brand, ultimately it means like you have the trust of customers. And so they are going to be willing to pay a premium for your product.

Josh Hadley 00:25:17  There are. We see this even for our own brand. If you have external marketing and you show up in other marketplaces, or especially if you’ve executed the retail playbook, brands now or sorry, customers now have so much more trust with you as a brand. They will seek out your brand and only your brand, even though you might be double the price. Because I think the Amazon customers are also becoming smarter where they’ve gotten burned a good number of times on the cheap crap that just breaks, and they’re willing to pay a premium for a brand that they know they can trust because they’ve seen it somewhere else, might have been from an influencer, or might have been from TikTok. But it’s that trust. So I think that’s just like the name of the game. It’s always Amazon’s going to throw us curveballs, and if you’re not building a real brand, it’s super hard to be able to navigate that. But it all stems from really basic fundamentals and financials, which again, most people are just looking at their seller board dashboard and be like, I made money today.

Josh Hadley 00:26:13  That’s it. And I think that goes to the wayside over the next 3 to 5 years time and again.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:26:19  Josh, that’s a good example. We’re like okay Amazon increased you know some fees or something. And you’re angry and you’re picking a fight with Amazon and you’re like, I can’t raise my prices because my foreign competitors will keep their price the same. But you’re blaming Amazon for that. Like this again comes back down to the root of the problem. It’s like if your foreign competitors have regulatory advantage of like 4,050% better margins than you. Why are you blaming Amazon? That’s not Amazon’s fault. Amazon abides by the laws the United States of America. Go change the laws for a fair like Mark. Like these are like the like you’re trying to address something that’s not the root of the problem here. And I mean, the other thing too is like, I think at the end of the day, Amazon operates a business exactly the way we would operate the business, right. Like, so let’s talk to credit cards like Amazon is, you know, switching everyone to either invoice payments or seller funds payments for for ads to save about 3% credit card transaction fees per year.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:27:06  If you think about the like, you know, the billions of dollars that flows through Amazon adds, that amounts to billions of dollars in incremental contribution. Profit margin right there. Boom. Done. Look easy. Would we make that same decision, Josh, would you CEO of Amazon, would you make that decision.

Josh Hadley 00:27:20  All day long?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:27:21  All day long? All of us would make the same decision. So we have to stop thinking of Amazon as like our daddy, you know, taking care of us like, no, Amazon’s a business. It’s going to it’s going to operate itself like a business. Because if it doesn’t operate like a business, it will die. That is the reality. And all of us need to operate our businesses in the same way. You know, whether it’s like hiring or salary negotiation or whatever it is. Like I always tell people say, hey, we have to make decisions not based on how I feel about you, but based on the business, the business. This is this organic living being thing that if you don’t make the right decisions for it, it will die.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:27:55  And it could die a slow death, it could die a quick death. There’s many different ways. And so yeah, have that framework okay. Cool. Amazon is doing a fuel surcharge. Did Amazon’s fuel go up. Yeah very likely right. Like I mean everyone’s fuel went up. So would you do a fuel surcharge if you could. Yes we all probably would. And can Amazon do it? Like who’s Amazon competing with. Amazon’s competing with Walmart with target they’re competing with. Can Teemu a little bit sketch. But like general they’re competing with US competition who have the same price structure as them. They have an advantage because they can do that. Walmart can do that. The rest. We are not competing on that same playing field at Amazon, compete on at the retailer level. Again, the root of the problem. How do we solve that? Go to work. Sign up get involved. Like that’s how we can solve that. Again, I think that just that thought popped my head when you started mentioning like, you know, do your pricing.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:28:43  But at the end of the day, look, if you go back to brand building, if you have a brand, you can increase prices. And so long as you are not being egregious in your price increases, you have power to do that. And if you can’t do that, then you need to rethink about what you’re doing.

Josh Hadley 00:28:57  Totally agree with that. Shinghi, this has been an enlightening conversation so far. I want to point our attention towards another really, really interesting topic, which is all things AI and e-commerce. And from my standpoint, man, is it noisy. Right now everybody is talking about AI and this new dashboard that they just created and how they’re using a cloud, you know, bot now to basically go and run all of their ads. Somebody is now optimized. PPC just runs autonomously without any human involvement anymore. And so it’s hard to feel like you’re just always behind the game. But you spoke about this really, really well at MDS inspire, and I’d love for you to just kind of like share your overall framework right now.

Josh Hadley 00:29:40  I still think we’re in the very early innings of AI, and it’s going to continue to evolve and change. And heaven forbid we talk about a certain platform, because by the time this thing airs, like it’s probably out of date because things are moving so quickly. But tell me your perspective and like you are in the SaaS world and you are also in the physical products business, so what are you seeing and what’s your advice and recommendation to sellers who feel like I’m just behind? Where should I be putting my time?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:30:07  Yeah. So it’s all about time. Yeah, at the end of the day. So my my general thinking for people is there’s a couple of different types of SaaS apps. Right. There’s what you call Crud apps, which is like create read, update, delete. Right. That’s like a Monday board or a sauna board where you add a task, you update it, you delete it, complete it, whatever. Very easy to build with AI. Right. Like you could build that up, you know, have it up and running in a day or you get to 80% of the day, something like that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:30:30  What people need to remember now, though, is when you create something, you own it. That’s yours. Maintenance. That’s you. Customer service. That’s you fix a bug. That’s you. And so, so many people I’ve talked to, like countless folks who are like spending hours a day managing their little apps that they have because they’re trying to save 100 bucks on SaaS. I want people to like you need to reframe your mindset on what is my time worth, and should I be focusing my time on this? So, for instance, let’s take like a SaaS project management tool that’s 100 bucks a month. Should you be spending like ten hours a month on this tool? Right? Probably not. Like now. you like when people do the math on how much time it takes even to do a simple app or a simple thing, it never works out in their favor. Like SaaS is theoretically a great deal, even though you can build it yourself. Like, yes, you can go build whatever you want yourself, but the maintenance of it, the Or like the actual running of the thing now becomes your responsibility.

Josh Hadley 00:31:26  Even if even if it’s an expensive SaaS though, I would say even if it costs $500 a month, even $1,000 a month, there may be some massive time savings depending on like what you’re getting out of that app. So continue on that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:31:39  Yeah. And like so like SaaS like I, I’m actually like like I’m an Amazon bull. I honestly think SaaS in general is a great deal in general. There are some cases I’ll give you some examples where like Shopify for instance, I was using a couple of different apps and I just spent one night on cloud code with cloud typically, and I replace all of them, not all. Most of them I saved about like let’s say $400 a month. What is it worth my time? Probably not. Did I just want to do it for fun? Yes. Right. But, like, see, these are the examples where like. But now I am responsible. If that stuff breaks and I lose one day of sales, I have now lost my entire investment.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:32:14  I would have been better off just paying the SaaS fee. Let them deal with it. Uptime, all the other stuff that’s on me. So we’ll see. Right. Because if that goes down one day, that’s all gone. All my savings for my SaaS fees are all gone. And then you have like, you know, then there’s like an app that I’ll give an example like expand ify is not a Crud app. Like we are a pipeline. So we pull from APIs, we process. We then process your data, we store and data warehouses, your data, and then the layers on top of that is we make it useful in multiple layers, right. We take raw data. You transform it into usable data, and then you transform usable data into reports. That full cycle of work does not end when the report is generated. Now you get the fun job to maintain everything before this and you want to add a new feature. You want to add a new sales channel. You want to enhance something like all of that is like, we have a never ending pipeline of ideas on the ways that we can improve it.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:33:04  So like, yes, I operate a physical product business and I operate a SaaS business, and I work two full time jobs, like I worked at 10 p.m. every single night, literally every single night, in part because I enjoy it, but also in part because, like I am solving for for my use case, like I’m solving to expand upon the problems I have in my physical products business. And when I solve this problem for me, I solve it for all of my users. But just because you built an app that solves a problem for your physical products business does not mean that you are now a SaaS company. This is very difficult. Now you got to go get members. You got to go get users. You have to have test it. You have to find. Here’s another good example. If you QA something with only one merchant, you’re usually wrong. But that’s the reality. You are usually wrong and you’re blind to see it. When you QA something with multiple merchants, you can actually see the issue and you fix it at the root cause.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:33:51  And now everyone inherits that fix. So the more custom one like one verse one software, you are likely also blind in some ways. So yeah, software like can you build your own. Yes. Where I think AI is the most useful is interpreting large amounts of data. So, you know, for instance, like you can download your cat lab report and you can interpret this data. You understand what fields are missing. You can make updates to that, like cool, great use of AI or, you know, the example of like expand Phi. We have an MCP server which allows you to pull in reports, and we have 76 different reports. And it is like a ton of information to manage in your mind. I boom boom boom boom. It’s going. It’s bringing records. It’s putting them together. It helps you then tells you what to do. So it depends is at the end of the day it depends. But we were at the like. Everyone discovered cloud code in February. I’ve been using cloud code like since like early last year.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:34:36  Basically, like when it first came out, everyone had the enlightenment that I like to call where like you get to 80% in a day and you feel like you are a god. You are on top of the world. I am now in control of everything. I can clap my lights, turn on whatever it is right to get to the remaining 20%. Nobody’s ever achieved it or like very few people have achieved it who don’t have software or engineering backgrounds. And you will spend days and weeks and hours to get there, and many people just give up before it’s done. Like, I can’t tell you how many people have gone this path and they give up right here because it is so difficult to get what you want to work consistently. That has not changed and the infrastructure and all the rest built up. Nothing has changed there. The 80% goal easy. Crud apps relatively easy. But even we built our own internal Crud app to manage tasks. There’s still bugs in this thing all the time. We still have to fix it like I’m spending my engineering time or my engineer’s time to like, go do that instead of building our product.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:35:25  So where do you want your focus to be?

Josh Hadley 00:35:27  We love.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:35:27  That. Where do you want your focus to be?

Josh Hadley 00:35:29  That that’s the key thing that you just touched on. Where do you want your focus to be? And I think that’s kind of like we’ll wrap things up, we’ll put a bow on this thing where I just feel like there’s a lot of FOMO out in the marketplace, and there always is. It’s, well, so-and-so created their own dashboard, and so surely I need my own dashboard using AI, or else I’m going to be behind. And so my stance on AI is like, yes, you should be using even a ChatGPT or use cloud and use coworking and begin implementing it in very specific use cases. And my recommendation is if there is something that you do day in and day out today that is repeatable or even it’s once a week. Like see if you can turn that into a process. Because if that can, if you spend, let’s say it’s two hours a week doing, I don’t know, reconciling your maybe like your financials or pulling these reports something like that.

Josh Hadley 00:36:21  If that can be automated, you slowing down to take the 8 or 10 hours it will take to figure out the process, build the process, debug the process, make sure it actually works if that can, then save you. All right. Ten hours invested now. Saves me two hours a week, 52 weeks in a year. I’ve now saved myself over 100 hours. And that will compound time and time again. If I go reinvest those other two hours to go do something actually productive in the business. If I take those two hours and go play video games, well, all right, you just you cost yourself a little bit of time. But if you actually like take that time to then go generate new growth, new revenue in the business. That’s where brands really start to scale. And I think like too often, I think people are getting caught in the weeds of a lot of admin tasks. They feel busy, they like being busy. They like working 60 hour workweeks. That’s great.

Josh Hadley 00:37:13  But they’re working on the wrong tasks. And so that’s why I’d say, like use AI first and foremost to try to automate any admin related tasks that you have in the business when it comes to the revenue generating tasks in the business, meaning AI or sorry, advertising like that’s going to generate revenue for you. That’s going to be one of the later things that I would try to automate with AI because like, that’s extremely nuanced and it’s going to be different for every single brand. In addition to that, product development I know is where I can generate a lot of revenue. So like if I could just say, hey, Josh, you now have 20 more hours a week to go, just do better on your ads and do better at finding new product opportunities and coming out with better product ideas. I think that will outcompete anybody. That’s just like, well, I bet. All of these automation systems and it just runs without me. Because I think ultimately, if you’re trying to get to that point where, oh, I just have bots that run my business for me, I think you’ve basically just turned yourself into a software engineer, and you’ve got to be able to have that skill set in order to do that.

Josh Hadley 00:38:15  I mean, there was a recent news article where somebody has already built the first $100 million plus business utilizing AI and what his brother as a team member. But there are other contractors that just didn’t disclose who they are or what role they play. But anyways, it’s because he had a tech background and he’s he was in that space. So I just think like people need to be careful with that. I personally am definitely not a software engineer. And so I’m not I’m not diving into that.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:38:40  Well, this is also like the point. And I did this at the NBS inspire talk. It’s telling people that oh here’s here’s a great example. Open claw right. Like I use cloud code and I could do most of everything that ever everyone else is doing with open cloud. It’s like, why are people spending so much time doing that? Lo and behold, like a month later, code has launched all of the features that OpenCL has for the most part. And it’s just easy. It’s seamless. It’s inside the app now.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:39:01  So all of the time that you spent setting that up and getting everything running, like now, you could just use a software provider to do that. So yeah, there’s a month delay. But any good SaaS company, for instance, like you create a dashboard, you create a report, any good SaaS company will go and do the same thing, but now you don’t have to maintain it. So yes, like you could be maybe a couple of weeks first. But at the end of the day, SaaS is like their core function is to innovate as fast as possible. If they fail that function, they lose. This is how you win. So it’s like, don’t expect that you vide coding are going to outpace a SaaS company that’s in the same space like that will again, if it’s a horrible SaaS, if it’s like, you know, a bunch of like 69 year old dudes, like on their way to retirement. Yeah, sure. Maybe you could do that. But it’s very difficult to do it for a focused SaaS company.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:39:44  Like I personally have that driver, like we will never be behind. That’s my goal, right? Like, never be behind perfect data all the time. Never be behind. And again. Because when I saw that report for myself, I sold it for you. I sold it for literally everyone else. They all inherit it. That’s the fun part. But that’s the job of SaaS.

Josh Hadley 00:39:59  So really well said.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:40:01  Yeah.

Josh Hadley 00:40:02  Well, said she, as we wrap things up, is there anything that we haven’t touched on yet that you feel like our audience needs to know?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:40:07  No, I think that’s just go build a brand. You know, at the end of the day, guys like, that’s where you will enjoy your life. You will sleep better at night. You sell a great product. You take care of your customers. You have a great team of people around you. Yeah, it’s it’s the dream, right? All of us, like, search for in our life, business wise.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:40:26  And then it allows you to do other things with your time and money. At the end of the day, you know, but never forget, like, yeah, if you get rich, like, that’s a responsibility to go do something for the world. Like you can’t just take that money and go enjoy the rest of it. At least I can love it.

Josh Hadley 00:40:39  Yeah, I’d love to leave every episode with the following three action items. So here are the three action items that I noted for today. You let me know if I’m missing something, but action item number one, this goes back to really basics. And it might not be the sexy shiny hack that lots of people like to talk about, but I think it’s one of the most important ones. Fight for a free and fair marketplace, because if we get that free and fair marketplace where everybody has to abide by the US laws and they’re actually enforced, my goodness, like, you don’t like everybody’s on the same playing field and you’re no longer having to play that like race to the bottom pricing game that your overseas competitors get to play because they don’t have to pay the same taxes that you have to pay here in the US.

Josh Hadley 00:41:20  So action item number one is join that ABA, the organization and the alliance there that Shinghi is one of the founders of. And again, thank you for all of your work that you do for the community there. Action. Item number two is to build a real brand. What does it mean to build a brand? Well, if you’re an Amazon first brand and that’s where you got your start, just having a storefront on Amazon does not mean you have a brand. What a brand actually means. It’s the associations and what type of associations can you create? Well, influencers is one of those things, and it’s also a component of that external marketing and awareness. Because if you’re just paying for cost per click on Amazon, you’re you’re only arbitrage in keywords. And so at the end of the day, you’re just trying to find whoever’s in the market for XYZ that needs it overnight or tomorrow and is willing to pay that price. But if you want to become a true brand, it’s those it’s those affiliates.

Josh Hadley 00:42:15  It’s those creators that you can align yourself with that builds trust with the marketplace. It then when you’re advertising on meta or if you execute retail or wholesale distribution, again, it establishes that trust and visibility. And that’s where people begin to know you and your products. And at the end of the day, it’s having a quality product. That’s where this all stems from. Because if you don’t have that foundation, your affiliates and creators are going to roast you. Nobody’s going to want to carry your products in wholesale and retail. And you said this best if you’re just building a brand that’s off of like, oh, black hat tactics or I did this hack and I got this result. I made a, you know, a few hundred thousand bucks. That’s great. But is that going to be a sellable asset? Most likely not. And so think about what you’re actually building. And I think this is a very true principle of life. It’s when you do the right thing, you might grow a little bit slower than other people that use the latest hack or something to take advantage of an opportunity, but you will be able to, right, like kind of oversee the different tides and things that are going to be thrown at you over the course of the next 3 to 5 years.

Josh Hadley 00:43:18  You’ll be able to adapt and navigate all of that if you actually are building a true brand. So that’s my action item for number two. My third and final action item is to avoid distraction. And the FOMO is real. And you go to a conference and you hear somebody crushing it on this other marketplace. And so you immediately come back and you’re like, well, I got to go over there. So then you shift your entire focus over to that marketplace or whatever hack it was that you saw or whatever presentation you saw and you shifted everything. And then what ends up happening is that new product that you were working on developing never goes live, and you’re no longer focused on Amazon, and your competitors start picking up more market share because you’re distracted focusing on maybe it’s open claw, right? Somebody set up Open Claw and is running an open claw bot for all of their PPC. And you think that that’s the next thing that’s going to ten X your business? I don’t think it is. So avoiding distraction, focusing your time on the true value levers that actually will drive an outsized return.

Josh Hadley 00:44:15  And there’s only a very few things that actually will do that in a business. Number one is marketing. Number two is who you hire because humans, if you hire the right ones, can have an infinite ROI to your business. And then launching incredible products they can surprise you with, like how how quickly they’re adapted into the market and how quick people, you know, consumers eat them up. So shiny. Those are my three action items for the listeners. Anything else you feel like I missed?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:44:40  So last one, I’ll just touch on the FOMO and like, you know, like there was a hack which was like, hey, you always need to be launching new products, right? The way you win on Amazon is always be launching. You have to caveat, literally every hack where it’s like your results may vary. And that hack I built a report and expanded its called Sales Bug product page, and it shows you what percentage of your sales are coming from products that are older than 24 months, or 18 months, or 12 months or six months.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:45:03  And like I remember sitting down with one of our users and I was like, how much time you spent launching new product last year? And he’s like, dude, it’s like, it’s like half the year. Like, you’re so focused. It’s full time effort. And then I was like, pointing to this bar graph and I was like, you know, like 3% of your sales are coming from your new products versus 97 coming from your heritage. Like you would be better off doubling down on your bestsellers, expanding distribution. Right. Trying to get into the Walmarts or the targets or the retailers. Go to Amazon. Canada goes into Mexico like you would be so much better off spending your time on the right things than just being stuck. I always need to be launching new products, right? So like, every business is so different that you can’t just like treat one hack is like, that’s the way I grow the business. Like I’ve done it. Believe me, I’ve done launch a bunch of products and then we pull back a bunch, and then we doubled down on what we did the best, and it’s taken off like.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:45:49  So. Yeah, there’s a hack for everything, but at the end of day, it’s like, just be guided by what’s actually best for your business. Use simple logic. A new channel like Amazon Canada costs almost nothing, and you get all of the reviews of your products, and now you’re selling Canadians the size of California. So it could be like 10% of your business anyway. There’s stuff like that. Be careful with the flow. Also, I’ll leave one more tip because it’s just like so many e-com guys get pulled into this year. You run a risky business in e-commerce. It’s some sort of like risky. You deal with Covid changes, whatever changes, you get it right. Like you’re on. You get it right. You’re 3.5% fuel surcharge. Don’t think like, don’t be making risky investments in addition to having a risky business like I am such a S&P 500. Just like put your money in the market, people will add value in the market. Other ways like you don’t need to be just completely diversifying risk into more risk.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:46:39  Don’t do that. Keep it simple. Don’t try to, like, make $1 million tomorrow. Keep it simple. That’s the way you are really going to protect your growth, protect your assets and kind of be long term setup. There is no better grade. You can do real estate and other things too. But yeah, I do not invest money with other people. Josh that is a rule that I have. I will only invest in the S&P 500, nothing else because I’ve seen too many people get absolutely screwed from this.

Josh Hadley 00:47:03  Now there’s a whole thread in the Facebook group just about that recently. I mean, that’s a whole other conversation for another time. But you’re right. Your risk is all associated in the business. And so diversify your risk by taking whatever money you’re pulling out of the business and stop going and lighting it on fire in these other ways that you’re going to get 20%, 30%, 50% returns, because it’s not meant to do that. That cash is meant to just like, help you make better business decisions and help you sleep well at night and compound year after year after year after year.

Josh Hadley 00:47:37  That’s the purpose of that money. Take your bets in your business. And you’re right. Amazon and all of e-commerce is a risky business because all of our eggs are in somebody else’s basket, whether that’s Meta’s basket, whether that’s Google’s basket or whether that’s Amazon’s basket or Shopify or TikTok shop. At the end of the day, if somebody wakes up and suspend your account, there’s not a whole lot you can do other than back channeling, but like, it’s just one of the facets of the business. And so yeah, really well said there. We could go on for hours.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:48:03  Yeah. I gotta say one more thing, Josh, I’m sorry, but the real reality is that once you have a secure nest egg to like, whether you’re like you paid off the mortgage on your house or like you have enough money to, like, fire and retire early if you wanted to, you will then make better business decisions. Like that is true. So get to that point where you don’t need your business anymore.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:48:22  You have enough on the side that you’re like in a very good spot. Because when the day comes to sell your business or to make a business decision about it, you are not just going to be grabbing whatever comes. You can actually take a deep breath. What’s best for me here? You know, I don’t need to sell this today. I can keep operating. I’m in a good place. Like you will make such better decisions all the way around. So that’s. That’s another part. Just keep it simple.

Josh Hadley 00:48:42  Fantastic. All right. Final three questions for you. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:48:47  Man, I’m not much of a book reader. I am a synthesizer. I think most books should be blog posts. That role that I mentioned earlier is very important. I have it in the back of my mind all the time. You make 20% of your business. You make 80% of your business. Never forget that. Yeah, and there’s some higher and develop the best.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:48:59  There’s some other books too, but that’s that’s the main thing that comes to my mind, because if you have that as a guiding principle, you’re in a good spot.

Josh Hadley 00:49:04  Fantastic. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool that you’ve been using and how have you been using it?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:49:09  Cloud code. Every day. All day. Did I start that sucker up when my computer starts up cloud code? A couple tips for that. You need to always figure out how to do the bypass permissions like your results may very be careful with that too, but it’s incredible. Bypass permissions set up Claude on. Get the mobile app. You can now leave cloud code running on your computer. You can operate it from your phone. You can do. It’s just endless. They built everything that open core has. It’s in there. Incredibly powerful tool.

Josh Hadley 00:49:31  Love it. Third and final question is who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-comm space that other people should be following and why?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:49:38  I really like Logan from Physician’s Choice.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:49:39  You know, he’s actually doing a he’s building out like a whole YouTube series now about himself and like the decisions he’s made and he’s made some good decisions. You know, so like, I would recommend learning from him versus a guru. Like there’s there’s people that build brands and there’s people that sell products. Focus on the people that are building brands. Yeah. Ignore the life maxing people. There’s some odd folks out there, but like. Yeah, like, you know, building brands, good families. Like, at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about.

Josh Hadley 00:50:04  Great recommendation. Yeah. If people want to follow you, reach out to you, connect with you, what’s the best way to do so?

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:50:10  Follow me on X is going to be the best way. Yeah. Just changed.

Josh Hadley 00:50:13  Easy enough. Well, thanks again for your time today.

Shinghi Detlefsen 00:50:17  Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me.

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