Andrew co-founded Reason Automation after years at Amazon, working on their retail and vendor businesses. There, he learned data wasn’t just a resource—it was the backbone of every decision being made. To be successful, you had to dive into the numbers yourself, without a team of analysts to rely on. That hands-on experience shaped his approach to data and inspired him to create a company that helps other businesses tap into the power of their own analytics.

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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Andrew Hamada, co-founder of Recent Automation. They discuss two pivotal factors for scaling e-commerce businesses: effective data analytics and task prioritization. Andrew, leveraging his experience at Amazon, emphasizes the importance of transforming data into actionable insights without getting overwhelmed. He advises entrepreneurs to focus on key tasks that drive growth and to understand product-level profitability. The episode also highlights the necessity of regular monitoring and the value of constructive feedback in leadership. This conversation offers invaluable guidance for scaling seven-figure brands to eight figures and beyond.

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

 

Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Sponsor for this episode…

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.

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 am speaking with Andrew Hamada, and today we are going to be talking about the two things that are going to set you and your business apart from the competition and allow your brand to be able to scale and win in today’s competitive environment. 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 partner or coach who can help take your business to the next level, reach out to me at Ecomm Breakthrough. Com. That’s ecom with two ends and let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to introduce you all to Andrew Hamada. Andrew co-founded Recent Automation after years at Amazon working on their retail and vendor businesses. There, he learned data wasn’t just a resource, it was the backbone of every decision being made.

Josh Hadley 00:00:52  To be successful, you had to dive into the numbers yourself without a team of analysts to rely on. That hands on experience shaped his approach to data and inspired him to create a company that helps other businesses tap into the power of their own analytics. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Hamada 00:01:07  Thanks for having me, Josh. Glad to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:01:09  Andrew, before we hit the record button, you are dropping some massive knowledge bombs on me with just kind of your your approach to business and what you’ve seen help businesses scale from 7 to 8 figures. We dove into those two things that are super critical. And today we’re going to be talking about those two things, and we’re going to be talking about data analytics. And before people start snoozing on this podcast, because like are data like that’s too much like too many numbers. I’m not a data guy. We’re not going to be diving into the numbers per se, but we are going to be talking about is how to use the numbers and which numbers to actually pay attention to that are going to make a significant difference in your business.

Josh Hadley 00:01:45  So Andrew, cut to the chase. Tell me, what are those things that you’ve seen in brand owners that makes all the difference? That sets brand a apart from brand.

Andrew Hamada 00:01:53  Be a really good question, Josh. And before I dive into that, I really want to emphasize your point that I know a lot of folks get not intimidated, but just they start tuning out when we start talking about the value of data, because I think so many people have talked about that in broad on actionable terms. And we all recognize that data is a gold mine. We’ve all heard the buzzwords, we’ve all heard that data is the new proprietary mode of consumer AI, etc. but that doesn’t make it any easier for us to take action on. And so the very first thing I actually want to emphasize is a mental model for success. That has been super applicable for me, not only as a data leader, but that I’ve seen every single successful seller apply whether they meant to or not. What I found is that what causes sellers to struggle with taking advantage of data is sellers or operators.

Andrew Hamada 00:02:33  If you’ve grown your business from 0 to $1 million or $5 million a year in revenue, you did that through a ton of hard work of 80 to 100 hour weeks, sometimes not paying yourself. And in general, the dynamic that you faced every single day as a seller is you have 100 things to do. 20 of those things is super valuable. Going to move the needle for your business, going to drive growth, going to make things more profitable, be good for the brand, etc. and you get time for five, not 95. Five. And that means that tomorrow, the other 95 things you didn’t pick go away. Those opportunities don’t come back because tomorrow you have another 100 opportunities. You can’t hand them off to your team without being aware that your team also already has 100 things, and anything you add to their list becomes item 100, 100, 203. They still only have time for five. And so in my experience, there are only two skills that separate effective entrepreneurs. And surprisingly, neither of them has to do with data.

Andrew Hamada 00:03:18  The first is when you’re faced with those hundred things every day, how do you get really fast and efficient at picking and justifying your five things? That’s never going to be a data driven analysis. There’s no cellar that’s going to open up their console in the morning and say, well, let me go open up super granular data and do a deep dive on my business every single day to go identify what those hundred things are and then do deep dives to validate each of those things. And then and only then take action. If you’re a seller and you’re listening to this, that has probably has nothing to do with how you actually operate your life. Instead, you’re waking up. You’re putting out fires. You’re putting out as many fires as you can before anything burns down, and then you’re trying to figure out what the most impactful thing that you can do next is as quickly as you can. And that doesn’t give you a ton of time for rigorous analysis. It requires a combination of business acumen. It’s a combination of your own instincts, your own experience, resources, helpful folks like Josh and anybody else that you have in your corner with the right expertise to help you reduce that ambiguity.

Andrew Hamada 00:04:06  But it’s not you going and saying, let me get more data. Skill number one reducing of those hundred things. How do you pick the five quickly and defensively? But perhaps even more important is the second skill you need, which is you need to learn how to let go of the 95 things that you don’t choose. And this is actually the skill that I see end up harming a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included in the past, because it’s so hard to look at opportunities going away and being okay with that. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re here because you are tired of watching opportunities go by without being able to take advantage of them, and you decided to do something about it. And so what I’m describing, letting go of other opportunities on purpose, might feel like anathema to you. And yet it’s the only way to keep yourself focused on the main priorities every week. Because if you’re carrying over the 95 extra things every week and tomorrow, you don’t have a hundred things to choose from, you 195 and the next day you have 295 for the next 390.

Andrew Hamada 00:04:53  And your decision making isn’t going to get any better. In fact, it’s going to get worse as you have more and more options to choose from and fewer and fewer decision making mechanisms to help you with it. So really, every business owner, whether you are an Amazon seller just starting out, an established seller or a service provider like myself trying to help folks out, I think that this mental model is critical to success. Get good at picking and justifying your five things and let go of the other 95 as quickly as you can.

Josh Hadley 00:05:13  Yeah, I love that. And I think, like you just laid out like that, that is a foundational principle to business. This goes back to the word when people talk about business strategy. Business strategy is nothing more than the CEO, the owner, the founder being able to prioritize what things, what levers are we going to pull in our business that are going to make the biggest impact the fastest? Because guess what? You have unlimited levers that you can pull in your business, but you have limited resources.

Josh Hadley 00:05:42  You have limited time. So you have to identify which of the 100 levers, which five, which three do I actually want to focus on and be content with? Oh, I heard those other guys killing it over here in this space doing x, y, z. Do I need to be doing that into my business? Like you can’t do it all. So you, for your own brand, need to be able to identify what are the needle moving activities that are going to point you towards your North Star, which is growing your revenue and growing your profit at the same time. Right. And those are your North Star metrics, right? You want to talk about business priorities. It’s how do you a support revenue or B support my profit in the business. And everything else is kind of like there’s always going to be dumpster fires going on in the business, and you just got to be content with it and be like, it’s not going to be perfect. But I, as the business owner, need to let those dumpster fires burn in the background while I keep moving the ball forward, focused on the number one priorities in the business that are going to move the needle when it comes to revenue and profit.

Josh Hadley 00:06:36  12 months from now, 18 months from now, etc.. So Andrew, if that’s the true principle that is underlying our conversation today, my question to you then turns into we’re looking at data. There’s a lot of data Amazon’s is giving brand owners more and more data than they’ve ever had access to. And the principal is like, okay, so we’ve got all this data. Let’s not drown in the data. Let’s maybe point out five different data points that you feel like are going to be needle moving. So Andrew, maybe walk us through those like what are the data points that you see make the biggest impact. What have you seen in working with sellers where it’s like, hey, here are the blind points and and things that actually focus on that most people don’t.

Andrew Hamada 00:07:12  Really good question, Josh. And I’m going to give you a mediocre answer, in part because I think that to your point, there are so many different data points that brands can focus on. And frankly, I don’t know that there’s a unified set of 2 or 3 other than revenue and profit, of course, that every single brand should be focused on, because the nature of the problems and their opportunities are going to be different.

Andrew Hamada 00:07:29  It’s easy for me to say, look at search volumes every single day for your top X keywords, but if you are driving primarily off Amazon traffic to your selection, or you have some other sort of strategy, maybe that’s not super relevant for you, or maybe you’ve already optimized your search strategy to death. And that’s not where the high ROI activity for you is every week, as opposed to letting your agency handle it or some other situation. So I hesitate to be really, really prescriptive there. But that said, there are a few that I really encourage everybody to understand as clearly as possible. And it always relates to how hard is the data to get. It’s no surprise that the harder the data is to get, the harder it is to make sure it’s accurate, the less likely that somebody is to actually make use of it. Because again, you don’t have infinite time, you have to make decisions. And if you have to prepare and analyze data, understand it before you can take action on it, then that’s you’ve invested two, three, four of the things you can do that day on this one problem instead of just one.

Andrew Hamada 00:08:13  Sometimes it’s what you have to do, though, and in particular understanding your own product level. Profitability is a huge, huge, huge gap that many sellers are willing to allow themselves in the early days that can end up becoming really, really big gaps as the business grows in sales. For example, when you’re starting out, your primary care as a seller is almost certainly going to be cash flow. Can I ensure that I have the right amount of cash coming into the business to support future inventory, buy to support my marketing and business operations activities, etc. etc. and most sellers in those early days are so growth forecast and survival focused. Frankly, that profitability is a second order concern. And so the amount of money that they’re actually making per profit matters less than the amount of money that they’re actually clearing each settlement period, etc., etc. their cash flow focused instead of profit focused. But I encourage sellers as soon as they can to switch that mentality, because cash flow focus is obviously super important, but it ends up masking a lot of problems because you end up focused entirely on how much money is in the bank, and not on how much money is going to be sustainably getting added to the bank over time without thinking about it.

Andrew Hamada 00:09:09  That way, you end up just chasing cash flow over and over and over again without finding systemic strategic scale opportunities to improve it across all of your products and selection.

Josh Hadley 00:09:17  I love that, Andrew. So let’s double down. Let’s double click into that one. Do you have any case studies with any of your brands that you’ve worked with where they were primarily more cash flow centered? Right. And to be honest with you, I think a lot of the sellers listening to this and even myself included, like as we got started, it’s true. Like how much is sitting in my bank account and in fact, like I’ve run I’ve run cash basis accounting in my business. We run two books, we run the accrual side and we run the cash basis side. Because for me, cash basis shows me here’s how much ammunition we have to continue to go to battle. And then the accrual side says, hey, how sexy is my business to an outside investor. Slash like does it have good like financial fundamentals behind it right.

Josh Hadley 00:09:59  so and I can elaborate further on what how we’re looking at that data. But I’m curious how maybe you’ve worked with other brands that maybe have had issues that you could highlight here is like a case study.

Andrew Hamada 00:10:09  This can become a problem for brands with larger catalogs or who add products very rapidly to selection. And especially if you’re somebody who isn’t shy about, removing selection, your own selection, if it doesn’t seem like it’s working out, what can end up happening is you end up with a really large portfolio of products that may or may not be thematically related to each other super closely, and that may have very, very different unit economics from each other. And if you are moving fast, you’re probably not looking at the profitability of each individual product line or each individual SKU. You’re probably looking at it for the total business and managing at a trend level, and that can be fine, but it can also mask a lot of problematic trends. that might not be a big drag on your profitability today. But if you imagine growing your business 2X3X5X ten x like we all want to, then it can become a much, much bigger problem, one that you wish you would have resolved earlier.

Andrew Hamada 00:10:53  So as an example of this, we worked with a company that makes medical devices. and so you can think that they have a huge catalog of products because of size variations, physical body part variations, etc. a picture like a Band-Aid, but in different shapes and sizes for all over different areas of your skin. And this company’s catalog must have, I don’t know, 1500 SKUs in it, for a sub $10 million a year business, which is a lot of selection for that.

Josh Hadley 00:11:18  That’s a lot. If you’re under 10 million, for sure.

Andrew Hamada 00:11:20  It’s a huge amount. And so they they necessarily can’t manage it individually by SKUs, certainly not every week. If you were trying to manage individual SKUs on that basis, like you would lose your mind. and that means that they’re rolling things up into product lines and then examining profitability and metrics, growth metrics, etc., by product line or by category. And that’s super helpful. But it often means that, for example, on the ad side, that they end up spending more on a given SKU than they might have expected because that skew is being merchandised and promoted in a whole bunch of different campaigns across multiple different ad types, with different types of skew level attribution that might make it hard to get this complete picture of how much profit am I actually making on this product? So what we helped this brand do was calculate their actual profitability of ad spend, first by calculating true profitability from their actual transactions data and the settlement reports to understand.

Andrew Hamada 00:12:04  Net of all of Amazon fees and advertising, how much are you actually making? Translating that to a product level and then showing that as a ratio metric, we’re all used to seeing Roas and ICOs, right. And those are super, super important because they show efficiency of your ad spend based on revenue, but they don’t show it based on profitability. And sometimes those things can be wildly different. What we did with this analysis was help this brand understand that for some of their products that had reasonable rows 4 or 5, six rows, they were actually negative on profit return on ad spend, meaning that for every dollar that they spent on ads, they were losing an additional ten $0.15, maybe even up to 2 to $3, which made no sense to us, and certainly if this was a cold start problem. maybe they’re deliberately trying to lose some money in order to jump start demand and organic ranking, etc. but our message to them was, be sure that you understand exactly how much money you’re losing on these products, and you’re not losing a penny more than you expect.

Andrew Hamada 00:12:56  And instead, what we found when you presented this to them was they had no idea. They had no idea that in particular, there were three SKUs out of this 1500 SKUs catalog that were in way too many campaigns and were taking budget from way too many different ad types altogether all at once, and had cumulatively lost $135,000 for this brand in negative profit in the year before we worked with them, which was about two thirds of the total revenue that those SKUs drove for the year. These were there. Three of these SKUs were, I’m sorry, all three of these SKUs were in their top ten sellers. And yet it had escaped that level of nuance because of the roll ups they were doing. So we help them calculate what is your actual profitability per SKU. And once they had that data, they didn’t need to look at it and deep dive it every single week. They just needed to keep their eye on it and make sure that their looking for outliers. Did anything go negative on profitability on ad spend this week.

Andrew Hamada 00:13:41  And if it did, take a quick look. Is that what we expected or not? And then instead of it being something that surprises them a quarter or six months later as they look at their books now, they get a regular signal and basically an alert system that says, is there anything to pay attention to here this week? Yes or no?

Josh Hadley 00:13:55  I love that we have. All right. So we also have a large skew catalog. We have over 1600 SKUs right now. Granted we’re over that that eight figure mark. But you’re exactly right. One of the biggest unlocks that we had in our business is we hit well, it was about 7 million. And I was like, okay, this thing is starting to like to grow bigger than anybody can, like, actually manage all of these SKUs. I think we were probably just like 900 SKUs at that point. One of our biggest hires that’s made all the difference is really like a column, a data scientist, right? He has been able to gather all of the data and finally implement skew level profitability for our brand.

Josh Hadley 00:14:30  And that from there it was just like, all right, so cut the ones that are losers, right. And clean up the ones that are actually bleeding. But we didn’t know it because, you know, because I’m just looking at money sitting in the bank account. I’m looking at hey, overall for the month of January, it was a profitable month. That’s great. But that’s just because, you know, this guy is Robin, you know, our best seller, right? And the profit that they’re generating for the business, we’d be a lot more profitable if I paid attention to that stuff. So I love it. I think like the overall takeaway from this is like, if you are not looking at skew level profitability, you have to you must do that, because if you’re not, you’re definitely losing profit. And I also would say this it is a natural evolution in anybody’s business to retire old skews. And the reason why I say this is let’s think about a very successful company. Let’s talk about Apple.

Josh Hadley 00:15:15  Right. They’re a successful company. But do we still see the iPod or the iPod shuffle or the mini still around? No, not so much. Right. So like, look, things are going to change. Just because something was your best seller one day doesn’t mean it’s always going to continue to be your best seller. Thus, as the phrase goes, always be launching in the Amazon space and just business in general, right? There’s a reason why Apple comes out and refreshes their devices every every year, right? Nothing game changing has been released yet, but they’re just always refreshing. They’re always refreshing, always refreshing. And so like, those are simple principles to take into your business. And look, if you’re not looking at skew level profitability, it’s hard to know when it’s time to cut some of those products.

Andrew Hamada 00:15:53  That’s exactly right, and I love that you think about it from a selection and assortment perspective, because it’s not just about, you know, where do I spend money promoting? It’s do I even want to be in that business anymore? And I think the strongest entrepreneurs are those who look at their selection and aren’t precious about it.

Andrew Hamada 00:16:06  They aren’t they aren’t attached to any one product line. It’s not the thing that they invented when they were 15 and have been trying to launch for 20 years, and now it’s finally making their dream come true. they have no emotional ties to it because of the exact dynamic you described. And even if it is a top selling product, if you’re not looking at your profitability on a regular basis, the economics of those products, especially your top sellers, can change so fast because that’s what all your competition is paying attention to. We’ve had customers whose top selling SKUs became wildly unprofitable in a matter of months because of really significant new entrants. Driving up PPC costs 4 to 5 X in that same period where they previously had very, very low competition, maybe artificially low. And that can turn what was essentially an arbitrage opportunity for a little while into a huge money pit. And the faster you recognize that arbitrage opportunity is done, the faster you can get out and move on with your life. Instead of angst and saying, well, maybe if I just did things a little differently, it might turn out differently.

Andrew Hamada 00:16:53  Instead, the answer is no.

Josh Hadley 00:16:55  I love that. So yeah. Andrew, what other data points and maybe some other case studies? What are some general like? There is no magic like this data point. This data point, it’s all going to be very nuanced. But I think it’s these principles that we’re learning that it’s like do you have skew level profitability? Do you have so what are some of the other metrics that you feel like are important, maybe some case studies with other brands you’ve worked with?

Andrew Hamada 00:17:15  I’ve got a couple. But before we move all the way off of skewed profitability, I want to give you one more example that I think might resonate with your audience, because it certainly shocked our clients when they onboarded to our tool. We have a tool that calculates your profitability for you and lets you upload your own cost of goods sold and all that good stuff. So if if I’d met Josh a year ago before he hired this brilliant data scientist, maybe maybe he’d be a customer. But putting that aside, we do have a client who uses this tool, and they’re using it to understand the total profitability of their business and how it’s moving over time.

Andrew Hamada 00:17:42  And so not just what products are profitable this month, but what is the overall profitability of my business, and how is that evolving year over year and month over month? And what we like about this is that if you look at your year over year trends, that starts to give you a much different lens than just looking at profit actuals every month. Then you start to understand like, how is this evolving over time, net of things like seasonality, etc., etc.. And one thing that we helped the brand discover is that they were really focused on the negative year of your profitability of their brand, and they were struggling. they were really having a hard time understanding what they could do to reverse this trend, because every month they were looking at an overall profitability picture that was brutal. They didn’t need our tool to see it. That’s how bad it was. At first we were talking -50 to 75% declines in profit year over year. And it was across the board. It was fees, it was PPC costs, and it was so big and so widespread that they just had a really, really hard time pinpointing what to do.

Andrew Hamada 00:18:27  So using item level profitability, they were able to not only Pareto it a little bit by saying here are the five SKUs in our catalog that are driving 30% of that negative decline. They were actually able to do the reverse and see that despite this very consistent year over year profit decline, that there were some products in their collection that were actually doing better year over year on profitability, and they were masked by this overall negative trend. And if they hadn’t gotten into that product level insight, this brand never would have seen it. They would have continued assuming the whole catalog is on fire. And instead, what we did is help them find small tranches of content, some obvious and some very surprising, that were doing better than they expected. And we didn’t know what to do with it. But they’re the ones with the business expertise, so they understood. Cool. Let’s see what’s different about how we’re managing these products, what’s different about the customer demand, about how we’re operationally handling them and our costs? And how can we take those lessons and apply them to the broader catalog? They weren’t able to completely course correct the profitability issue, but within just last year, they were able to take that -61% for 2024.

Andrew Hamada 00:19:19  And I believe in Q1 so far this year. When I last looked, they were down to, I think -20%, profit decline.

Josh Hadley 00:19:26  That’s amazing. It’s just simply focusing on the right things in the business. Right. So I love that that case study. Great example. All right, Andrew, keep giving me some more. I’m liking what you’re talking about here.

Andrew Hamada 00:19:38  I’m going to give you one that I’m sure everybody is eager to talk about, which is a search query performance search query performance data for those who aren’t aware, is the brand analytics search data that only sellers get access to. It’s available both in seller central UI as well as via selling partner API and the data kiosk. And what it does is it gives you extremely granular search data, not only about how search in general is performing at Amazon, but how it performs specifically related to your product. And I think many, many people have covered to death how to use search query performance data for things like ad optimization and keyword optimization. So I won’t rehash that territory here.

Andrew Hamada 00:20:12  I think that those benefits are very well covered and pretty obvious. What I get excited about with search query performance is your ability to actually diagnose traffic declines at scale before getting access to skew. If you saw in sales and traffic in your business report that traffic was down and you didn’t change anything about ad spend, you didn’t really have a whole lot else to look at. Cool. what else can I. Can I investigate? I don’t know. I don’t have any way to investigate why Amazon’s traffic change. I can go look at website stats and see did Amazon’s total website traffic change. But that’s not a really helpful input. Not from my one product and my one category. Right. What is helpful is actually looking at your top 10 to 50 search terms and tracking the total search volume for those terms every week, and seeing how those changed. Because now if you see my top product saw 25% decline in page views, the very first thing that you can do is look at was there a 25% change in search term volume in search query performance? If there was okay, not a lot you can do about that.

Andrew Hamada 00:21:02  If there’s a 25% decline in customer searches across the entire portfolio of terms that lead to your product, looks like a customer behavior change looks like something else happening in the world. Nothing you can really take action on. But if it’s not the case, say search volume only declined 10% and your traffic declined 25%, something went wrong. Something is there’s a disconnect there and something about your organic position has changed. Maybe competitive activity has changed, but there’s something that you can actually then go click further on, not only for this week, but potentially at scale to get ahead of it for the weeks and months following.

Josh Hadley 00:21:32  Yeah, I love that. I think that that one is a critical piece to be able to understand, like and trying to identify and diagnose like, do I have an issue? Is it a new competitor that’s launched? Is it. Yeah. Amazon just search traffic as a whole. Everybody talks about like right now. And I feel like this has been the message for the last few years.

Josh Hadley 00:21:48  Oh the recession is just around the corner right. And then people will chalk it up like oh I’m business isn’t as good as it is this year. And I think it’s because of the economy. Right? I think that is the worst like answer. And it shows me like you don’t know your business then, right? If you just chalk it up to, oh, it’s the economy. It’s like, well, why do you say that? Right. Well if you’re like, yeah, Amazon searches as a whole like are down 50% year over year. And it’s not just me. It’s not just my session percentage. It’s search query performance like and and then you need to extrapolate that across multiple categories. Right. It’s not just one category. It’s like oh okay. Well fidget spinners have decreased 50% year over year okay. Well it’s just it’s not trending anymore. Like it’s not we’re not in a recessionary environment. Right? It’s not the economy’s fault. It’s understanding. Like, okay, the trends are shifting.

Josh Hadley 00:22:32  So I love that aspect. Like can you give me a do you have a case study on that. One of like brands that have seen that and then like what are the different levers that you’ve seen them pull? And here’s another question that I have for you, because I as a brand owner, I’m wondering, like I’m going to go diagnose, like, do I have an organic ranking problem, right? Did I just get the index for a bunch of keywords for whatever reason? Like does your software highlight that? Like if I identify like total search volume in the market stayed the same, but my sessions have fallen off a cliff. Am I able to go look at organic ranking different data sets within, you know, your tool to be able to diagnose those things deeper?

Andrew Hamada 00:23:06  I’ll take the last part first. The answer is yes. We collect a bunch of different signals that help brands associate business trends with other activities, because the main thing that you’re looking at analytics and reporting for is why did X happen? And we do that not only through things like organic ranking, sales performance, ad performance, etc., but also through things like viability search, depression, listing suppression, etc..

Andrew Hamada 00:23:24  one thing that we’ve tried to do is turn ephemeral notifications into actual, useful data. What we find is that Amazon has provided sellers with visibility notifications for a long time, but I imagine that somebody like you, Josh, with a large catalog, has experimented with those and very quickly discovered that it becomes overwhelming noise very fast because you’re not getting one notification per day. You’re getting, you know, 50 to 150 notifications per day. and that volume can change and go up and go down. And the notifications aren’t easy to read. They’re giving you some information, but you have to then do some research to understand, okay, why did this get pulled? Is it actually not viable? Like what is the CX like etc. etc. and Amazon doesn’t store those for you. They deliver them and then they vanish. And so what we’ve tried to do is create what we’re calling an event graph that allows you to correlate that kind of activity with business performance trends, not just right now, but storing it historically so that a quarter from now, when you’re doing a historical analysis, trying to understand why did an XYZ demand fall off a cliff three months ago, that you have some signals as to why unable to tie it back to it was because ad spend dropped and we saw performance drop in search volumes drop.

Andrew Hamada 00:24:24  And also, you know, three quarters of our catalog wasn’t viable for three months. Yeah. And all of those things taken together.

Josh Hadley 00:24:30  Love it. That’s very cool. All right. Now, I’ll let you go back. Do you have any case studies of people that have had those issues, and how you’ve been able to help correct them?

Andrew Hamada 00:24:38  Yeah. I don’t have a case study specifically around seeing search volumes drop, but I do have some around seeing search search volumes and search query performance highlight customer behavior changes. and I’m trying to figure out how I communicate this without compromising too much of who the customer is. But essentially imagine, imagine they make fidget spinners, to use your example. and people are going to be looking for fidget spinners using, you know, pretty discreet set of terms. Fidget spinner, fidget thing, fidget toy, etc.. And anybody who is in this market knows what the top 100 terms are related for those products. now imagine that over a period of two weeks, kids stopped calling them fidget spinners.

Andrew Hamada 00:25:14  And, some new slang term from the UK got really popular because it aired on TV one day on a show that was really popular with a customer segment on the East Coast and now East Coast kids are suddenly searching for this, using a different term in the US, and that over the course of a week, that term got popularized on TikTok. And now nobody is searching for fidget spinner anymore. They’re searching for something else. This is the kind of insight that regular scoop analysis helps you understand, because it’s not just helping you understand. Wow, my traffic dropped off. It’s helping you see okay, traffic for fidget spinner dropped off. And then STP doesn’t just show you actual search volumes, it shows you downstream performance of the product, etc.. And so this client then looked at fidget spinner and saw that not only the total performance of this term drop off or sole search volume drop off sales for this term across not only my brand, but everybody else’s products that Amazon is reporting on all dropped off. So this isn’t a blip in the universe and it’s not me.

Andrew Hamada 00:26:00  It’s something that’s happening at scale. And so this client said, okay, what the heck is going on? Had their intern look up. What are the new things that people are using for this, both within the Amazon search tools and on TikTok and in the ecosystem in general? Got a new keyword term list, updated their SEO, updated their ad campaigns, and what’s fine.

Josh Hadley 00:26:15  I love that well, and I love that there’s just especially if you have a broad catalog, there’s probably a lot of instances where that happens. And just like the way things, you know, call different terms or the way they search are going to change over time. So I love the insights. So all right, so to sum things up with our audience so far we’ve got looking at skew level profitability basically or profit level profitability. We’ve got also measuring data and diagnosing that along with your sessions data, identifying what’s happening in the keyword search volume for your overall category, new keywords, declining trends, up and coming trends.

Josh Hadley 00:26:48  All right. We’ve talked about those things. I think those are some pretty core metrics to be looking at for any business. Andrew, what other metrics I think are important for ecommerce brand owners to be looking at?

Andrew Hamada 00:26:57  I think the last data set that has been coming up a lot with our clients is promotional data. Amazon reports on promotion performance, coupon performance, subscribe and save performance, etc. in both Seller Central and Vendor Central UI, as well as via the APIs. And anybody who’s worked with the data directly has probably been a little frustrated because the shape of the data, without getting too geeky on you, makes it really hard to answer what most sellers would consider basic questions like what is the relationship between my promo spin and my sales? Not easy to answer using Amazon’s data. Instead, they give you schemas that help you report on individual promo performance, but make it extremely difficult to associate that data with anything else that’s going on in Amazon’s ecosystem. And this is an area that I see sellers end up giving up on because to our earlier point, it’s not easy and there’s no clear path forward.

Andrew Hamada 00:27:40  You have to think hard about what you want that data to accomplish, how much it’s worth to you, and then go find a solution that does those things for you at a price you’re willing to pay. This means that things like paid versus organic performance still tends to be focused on advertising rather than ads and promotions holistically, because promo data is still so hard to integrate into your overall business picture. Whether it’s a tool like recent automation or any of our competitors who are doing similar work. I think it’s really, really important that brand owners, especially small sellers, not get intimidated out of those insights because understanding your promotional performance at scale is a really, really critical way to optimize profitability long term and to make both your ads as well as your organic performance just pay more dividends over time. Whether it’s tuning your subscribe and pay promotions the right way, through targeting, through volumes, etc. whether it’s understanding the effectiveness of coupons versus in-line price discounts, etc. all of those things I think are really, really important to understand and only going to get more.

Andrew Hamada 00:28:34  So as all of the fees for these things go out this year.

Josh Hadley 00:28:37  Yeah. For real. Like especially as the pricing and the way you’re charged for coupons has fundamentally shift in 2025. Right. And this is only going to continue to change for Amazon. So I love that. Like I don’t think a lot of people tie two and two together right. The promotions data and overall sales and profitability and and even organic ranking and how they all interact with each other. So I feel like that’s super valuable. Now, Andrew, is there any other like, case studies that you feel like we should share with the audience of things that you’ve been able to help other sellers, resolve through their business by just focusing on the right data?

Andrew Hamada 00:29:09  Data sets on a slightly different track here. we helped one of our early clients, launch their agency. they essentially had been operating as a reseller for a long time, helping brands sell on Amazon through their own merchant account. And they were super, super data driven folks.

Andrew Hamada 00:29:23  But, they, like all of you, I imagine, were struggling to scale because they didn’t know how to compromise the level of data driven insights they were doing with the fact that they needed to do less of it to scale. How do they find the right level of investment in automation to make those things possible? And at the time, they were really struggling, in particular with the data types we’re talking about here profitability, search, query performance and other things that were a little bit harder to get out of Amazon systems and turn into usable insights. Everybody’s got a sales and traffic solution, but and ads especially, everybody’s got some sort of solution for ads. But it’s once you get more into the back office data, and certainly the more esoteric data sets that it becomes harder to do that at scale. And what they realized is it’s not just about extracting the data. It’s about making sure that it’s usable, making sure that it’s trustworthy, making sure that when Amazon blows things up, they have a partner to help them deal with the things that Amazon is blowing up.

Andrew Hamada 00:30:09  and then helping them validate it over scale. I’m sorry, validate it at scale over time. And then last but certainly not least, is helping them actually give feedback to Amazon so that when they discover things that are not good enough for them with the data, they have a feedback mechanism to make it better over time. And essentially, before working with us and working directly with this data, this brand was doing a lot of manual. I’m sorry. This agency was doing a lot of manual downloading, a lot of manual data prep either themselves or using Vas in order to get things that they couldn’t get through the API, etc., etc. and they were just very, very hesitant to build out their own API resources because when you’re a small agency, it’s almost never the right investment of your of your very limited dollars. Instead, they partnered with us, and by leveraging our tools and our data infrastructure, they were able to launch the agency and scale to ten plus clients in their first year instead of adding 1 to 2 like they originally planned.

Andrew Hamada 00:30:55  And that’s, I think what it comes down to for a lot of brands is how do you treat data as your opportunity to solve more problems than it creates as you scale, if you look at data and it’s more intimidating than inspiring, then you maybe not haven’t found the right partner yet. Or maybe your business isn’t at the right part of maturity curve yet to take on a whole bunch of data and analytics and that’s okay.

Josh Hadley 00:31:12  Yeah, Andrew, I love the way you kind of something. Something’s up right there. And I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something here. Action item number one is to don’t, don’t disregard the data. Right? I think it is being able to approach data with the mindset of, yes, I have a lot of different data reports that I can run, but I don’t have to look at all 100 different metrics. Identify and prioritize. What are the five key metrics.

Josh Hadley 00:31:44  And so action item number one is for you and your brand. Specifically what are those key metrics. Choose five that you can look at every day and have a report that is delivered to you, whether it be a VA that’s running the report or not. But you should be able to log in every day. That’s something that I do. And what I do is I’m focused on profit and revenue at this point and contribution margin okay. So when I log in every day, that’s what I’m looking at. Those are my kind of leading slash lagging indicators that will tell me, hey, we’re going in the right direction or. Hey, something weird happened yesterday. We need to correct this. And if you are looking at that in real time data rather than, hey, I got to wait until, you know, it’s mid in the middle of, you know, July until I can get my books for June and then see like did we, were we profitable last month. It’s like oh my goodness.

Josh Hadley 00:32:31  Like you’re straight up driving your vehicle and your business like you’re driving your car but only looking through the rearview mirror, trying to go forward. Right. Like you can’t do that. And so having real time data on a daily basis to help inform the decisions that you make so you can make faster and better decisions in that day, is going to be what allows your business to scale faster. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is then like I’m going to say one of the things one of your five priorities needs to be SKU level profitability okay. So make sure that in your business, even if you only have ten SKUs, right, get to the root of each of those and understand like what are their contribution margins? What’s their profitability. Because maybe you have a pet project that is your ninth in terms of profit, but is actually your number one in terms of revenue, right? And maybe that’s it’s actually sucking all of the profitability out of your business, but you don’t know it because it’s your number one seller.

Josh Hadley 00:33:24  And so maybe there are things that you can do. Maybe it’s the FBA fees that you could change. Maybe it’s your advertising that you could change to impact that and try to course correct. But skew level profitability will open up efficiency in your business. And then my third and final action item is to look at the data for trends and opportunities as you look to the future. Right. It is. You touched on it, right? Could be a TV show clip. That or ignites a whole new category in and of itself. Or it could be a TikTok trend. And if you’re not focused on data and understanding, like where the search volume is going in the market, you will be left behind. And the ones that stay ahead of that curve and are looking at that on a day to day basis. Guess what? They’re going to launch better products that meet the market demand where it’s at, and they’ll ride the waves quickly and it’ll always be launching, right. So how do you always be launching? Stay ahead of the curve.

Josh Hadley 00:34:15  See what people are searching for. So, Andrew, anything else that you would add to those three action items there?

Andrew Hamada 00:34:20  just one thing that came up, you know, as you’re mentioning speed and, you know, how do you manage this data and take action quickly, five KPIs, etc.? I think one thing that causes a lot of brand owners, a lot of angst, whether they’ll admit it or not, is fear of getting that wrong. like, I don’t know, data or I think I know data, but what if I don’t actually know this data as well as I do? What if I make a really terrible decision for my business? and there are certainly times when that’s going to be the case, like when you’re getting ready to sell your brand, for example, don’t listen to me. I don’t know anything about prepping your brand for exit and the minutia required to, you know, turn your business into a financial asset and all the ways that that works. But there are a lot of times when the level of precision that you need with data is not actually that high.

Andrew Hamada 00:34:57  And people, I think, get in their own way by thinking, oh my gosh, I don’t have enough data or it’s going to be too hard for me to understand or I don’t have enough complex data, etc. you do, I promise you do in almost every single instance. And so I guess the last piece of advice that I give your audience is to look for what I call head in the hallway feedback opportunities. And these are opportunities for you to test a hypothesis with a handful of data points collected. Super scrappy without needing to wait. And I call it head in the hallway because imagine that you are in college in the dorms, and it’s Friday night and you’re getting ready to go out. I know this is it’s been a minute for you and I, Josh, but let’s go back in time here. and you only have two shirts, clean shirts left in your closet, and you put on one. You think you look okay, but you’re not sure. So you stick your head into the hallway, and you ask the first three people that walk by.

Andrew Hamada 00:35:43  Hey, what do you think of my outfit? And the first three people that walk by, I’ll look at you and say, it looks hideous. Oh, my gosh, it looks terrible. What are you going to do? Are you going to say cool? Well, that was three data points, but I’m not really sure I need another 147 or so to reach statistical significance and be, you know, get a really true signal on the quality of my outfit. Or are you going to turn around and change your shirt? I’m pretty sure you’re going to change your shirt, right? and that’s the right thing to do. It’s the right signal you got. And certainly waiting for 147 more data points. Reaching statistical significance isn’t going to add any value to that. To that outcome. You got the signal you needed right away. And I would say even as a data person and as a big data person, a surprising number of decisions come down to head in the hallway feedback and can be made as well with head and hallway feedback as they can with big data, because sometimes you just need a signal.

Josh Hadley 00:36:24  Yeah, I love I love that analogy there of being at the college party. And you need to go change your shirt, right and get in feet. Quick feedback and being able to make a decision quickly. I also believe that that is one of the biggest growth levers for a brand is the speed of decision making, right? Let data be the guide, but don’t get so wrapped up in the data that it slows you down. And being able to make that decision. And really, the best way that I like to frame it is like, if you could get what if you were getting 80% of the decisions that you were making, correct? Would your brand be growing? Yes, of course it is. And guess what? The decisions that you make are incorrect. Those are going to be things that you learn from, that you refine and you’re like, okay, good, I made this mistake. I’m not going to do that again. But it helped get us to the right answer faster.

Josh Hadley 00:37:05  So if you just sit there and mull over it, though for weeks and months, somebody that just took action and learned within one week, there’s like, oh no, this, that was a bad call for whatever reason. But now here is the actual point that we need to be focused on so that I can make better decisions like. And that’s done within two weeks. Whereas somebody that went through thousands of data points to try to get to the right answer and still might not end up at the right answer. Right. Is is just far behind. The world is moving at a faster and faster pace, and so the decision makings need to be faster as well. And there’s two different ways to look at your decisions. Is this a decision that I can course correct if, if if I make the wrong decision. Or is this an irreversible decision? Most decisions, 99% of them are going to be reversible. Decisions that you could change if you make the wrong call. So what you can recover your business is not going to go to bankruptcy because of one decision.

Josh Hadley 00:37:53  There are those 1% decisions where maybe it’s you decide to implement black hat tactics for your business that can suspend your account, or you’re not paying attention to your Amazon business, and it does get suspended and you’re kicked off the platform for good. Right. Those are irreversible decisions that you have to make for the business. But there are so few of those. So I would just say don’t worry about it. Like make the decision, move forward, iterate and move quickly. So love that you double down on that Andrew. All right. My final three questions for you. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Andrew Hamada 00:38:24  Specific for this audience. It is a huge cliche in the MBA world, even though I don’t have an MBA. but there’s a book called Blue Ocean Strategy that I think pretty much every MBA is required to read these days, and it’s made its way down to undergraduate business classes as well, which is where I read it. but I strongly encourage sellers who maybe don’t have a formal business background to pick up that book and take a read, because it helped me understand competition and positioning in a way that was really inspirational for me, starting my own company and that I think is super, super relevant for anybody else that is considering an Amazon business, particularly in the modern era of hyper competition.

Andrew Hamada 00:38:57  What it teaches you is, they have a concept called the Strategy Canvas where you evaluate your business and you structure your business on competitive differentiators that nobody else is using. It’s very tempting, for example, to start an Amazon business and say, what do I want to sell? Okay. I want to sell a massage gun just to use a completely overdone category. And what do I want to compete on? Well, I want to compete on the, the speed and the strength and the price and the battery life. The same things that every other person is competing on in this space. And what Blue Ocean Strategy teaches you is that that’s the path to a bloody ocean. You’re competing on things that everybody else is already talking about has already established value proposition. Then you’re always going to be the challenger. And unless you have figured out something like, you know, a new law of physics or an arbitrage situation or something black hat, you’re not going to be able to have a sustained advantage against those people.

Andrew Hamada 00:39:43  It’s just not possible. Instead, what you need to do is consider how do you create an entirely different competitive landscape with attributes that you define instead of being beholden to the ones that everybody else is already playing on? And the key example that they give of this, or one of the ones that sticks with my mind, is Cirque du Soleil. For anybody who doesn’t know it, Cirque du Soleil is. This is the super, super expensive, beautiful, high production circus acts that you see mostly in Vegas, but sometimes also around the world, like hundred to $500 a ticket. Incredible athleticism and performance across many, many disciplines. And people forget that Cirque du Soleil is a circus, and that it was launched to compete with P.T. Barnum and Ringling Brothers, and tent circuses with animals, etc.. And what Blue Ocean Strategy shows you is that, when, Cirque du Soleil was launching, they considered, okay, how do we compete? Do we need to have, you know, what’s going to be in the main tent? And like, what animals do we need to have? And, what magicians and so forth and so on, and like, what? Concessions.

Andrew Hamada 00:40:35  And instead they completely blew this whole model up and they said, no, no food, no drink. we’re going to go super, super upscale. We’re not going to have any animals. And instead we’re going to go like incredibly high end with production values. We’re going to go with choreography to a degree that nobody’s seen before. We’re going to go for scale and magnitude. And they created a product that literally had never existed before, and they were wildly successful because of it. And now you have a ton of people that try to clone Cirque. Serc. Instead, they’ve made their own category, and that’s essentially what Blue Ocean Strategy tries to teach you to do, is don’t try to become competitor 25in somebody else’s category. Invent your own whenever possible. And it’s not as hard as it sounds. It’s as it can be as easy as defining your category through attributes that nobody else is choosing to use.

Josh Hadley 00:41:13  Yeah. Love it. Well said there. All right. Question number two. What’s your favorite AI tool or GPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Andrew Hamada 00:41:21  there are so many.

Andrew Hamada 00:41:23  and I’m going to go with a really, really boring answer here and say that net of all of the crazy things that I’ve tried. My favorite has come all the way back to Midjourney, and that’s the image generation tool in discord. And I say this even after all of the crazy new updates from ChatGPT image generation capabilities and the unification of all images everywhere, etc.. having been a designer for a long time, and I started my career in web and graphic design in the Amazon days, this has been near and dear to my heart. and I got really excited, as well as a little intimidated by a lot of these new generative AI image creation capabilities, and especially with the new OpenAI stuff. You saw all of the LinkedIn posts talking about this is the end of graphic designers and so forth and so on. And boy, was that overstated. Holy cow. If anybody’s actually used the tools, you figure out very quickly where the edges are, even with the best prompts in the world. And so this brings me back to Midjourney.

Andrew Hamada 00:42:11  What I really, really like about Midjourney, even now, is the flexibility and the specificity that the tool gives you. For example, OpenAI, you still got to create an image at a specific size. Midjourney is the only Imagen tool that I’ve used that consistently lets me create images along specific dimensions that I like, and then alter existing images to fit into different sizes, shapes, etc. this can be super, super useful whether you’re doing things like taking an existing image and turning it into a banner for LinkedIn, but also turning product images from squares into slide decks or whatever else that you need. it also, I think has much, much more nuanced image generation capabilities even now, just given the number of direct commands and controls that Midjourney still has baked in, it is less of that. Oh my gosh, wow. Magic factor. But if you’re a serious designer or you have specific things that you’re trying to create rather than just flashy stuff, I still say Midjourney is an incredibly powerful tool and under-priced Underpriced at the.

Andrew Hamada 00:42:57  Whatever it is, 8 or $11 a month that they charge you love it.

Josh Hadley 00:43:00  Great recommendation. All right. Final question. Who is somebody? The e-commerce space that has impressed you, whether it be building a cool landing page, PPC hack, supply chain, project management. Who’s impressed you lately?

Andrew Hamada 00:43:12  I’m very regularly impressed by people in my space because I, coming from Amazon, have a very, very specific lens on what it means to run a business. And especially when I meet sellers, I’m constantly learning stuff. but I think the person that stands out most recently is Jason Boyce. Have you have you heard of Jason?

Josh Hadley 00:43:27  I had I’ve had him on the podcast.

Andrew Hamada 00:43:29  Have you? Oh, perfect. well, Jason, I and I met, a year and a half, maybe two years ago. And we’ve been, building a friendship and a working relationship ever since. And Jason strikes me as one of the single smartest human beings in e-commerce that I’ve met. he, has firm ideas and thoughts and is unafraid to voice them, and is still extremely humble about having those thoughts and firm beliefs disproven.

Andrew Hamada 00:43:51  If the data shows that that that’s where they go. Jason earned my trust really early on by, in our first meeting, disagreeing with a tenant that I held and being unafraid to tell me, like, I don’t think that’s true, actually, our experience. Exactly the opposite. And giving me a five minute, I won’t call it lecture, but five minute deep dive on why that was true for him in his business. and, instead, I think some people might be put off by that, but I, I am so eager for feedback. And the higher up you get in the in a company as and now as the leader of a company, nobody gives you feedback. Certainly nobody, none of your peers and none of your teammates that you can necessarily feel is 100% true because there’s a power imbalance. And so I trust and I rely on objective third parties like Jason to challenge me in my thinking and help me evolve that thinking really, really rapidly. and Jason’s been a really good partner for that.

Josh Hadley 00:44:33  I love it, great recommendations. Andrew. If people want to follow you, learn more about you. Where can they do that?

Andrew Hamada 00:44:37  Our website is com. That’s where you can learn everything about us. But I am also hyperactive on LinkedIn LinkedIn. Go find me there. I post more than is probably healthy and I respond to most comments and questions, so just let me know if you have something to say.

Josh Hadley 00:44:50  Awesome, Andrew, pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks for your time.

Andrew Hamada 00:44:53  Thanks so much, Josh.