Josh Hadley 4:18
Yeah, yeah. So we’ll rewind the script here back to 2017. When we first you know, really dove into Amazon as our primary sales channel for Hadley Designs, you know, at the time, in 2017, it was still somewhat of the wild wild west of Amazon. And there were a lot of people preaching that, hey, Amazon can suspend your account at any time. And during the year of 2017. We actually, you know, hit seven figures, our first year on Amazon, so it was exciting, but at the same time, it’s like wow, we’ve built a decent sized business in just one year. Well, now let’s go diversify. Right because I just continued to hear people talk About Whoa, go build your own Shopify site because you don’t want to wake up one day and Amazon suspended your account. So really, this came from a place of fear for myself is like, oh, okay, like what, let’s go start trying to pursue other opportunities. Let’s not keep, you know, feeding the Amazon beast, rather, let’s kind of run away and see if we can generate the same amount of revenue elsewhere. And obviously, that is much easier said than done. So what we ended up doing, because we, you know, we genuinely spent three years trying to diversify ourselves off of Amazon. And I would say, that was probably one of my biggest mistakes. Because if we just would have doubled down on Amazon, and just been like, we’re all in on Amazon, we’re not doing anything shady, we’re not using black hat tactics. We’re not using gray hat tactics. Everything was white hat. So really, at the end of the day, like, we didn’t need to be scared of anything. And to this day, like we’ve our accounts been just fine. So that’s why I say like, if I could rewind the tapes and go back to 2017, I would tell myself, like, if you’ve already hit success in that particular sales channel, and you know, there’s more room to grow, go and double down on that sales channel, I would argue that Hadley Designs can be two or three times bigger than it is today. Had we just doubled down on Amazon rather than what we did do. And I’ll share that with you is trying to diversify our sales channels. So with Amazon, we were selling physical products, right? And we had this great idea that’s like, hey, let’s diversify ourselves. Let’s go create a Shopify site. And then hey, there’s also this good opportunity on on Etsy, where people are selling these digital files. And so we had this genius idea at the time. That was like, okay, so many people talk about how, you know, physical products, brands, you know, so much cap gets tied up in inventory, that cash flow becomes a problem. So, yeah, I think it would be great if we did just digital products, let’s go dominate that on Etsy. And then let’s open up our own Shopify site, we can maybe sell some of our physical products there. But let’s really sell these digital products. And again, we did this all out of fear, and running away from Amazon, which was, which was working great for us. So we ended up going in we spend, literally, we spent the last those next three years from 2017. Until 2020, we spent building out our our Shopify site, which honestly like, I think the best day we had was like maybe like one or $200, which is just like, laughable as we looked at Amazon, and we’re making, you know, thousands of dollars a day there.
So we spent three years working on Shopify, then we’re like, oh, we just need to figure out this external traffic thing and drive more traffic to our own Shopify site. So then we build a blog, and I have no experience building a blog. So we spent an entire year working on a blog, hiring people for this blog that’s making no money. And for this website, our Shopify site that’s making absolutely no money for us. And we just continue to double down in the wrong place, all of our time. And energy is focused on Shopify, building a blog growing our Instagram accounts so that we can feed traffic, we believed our problem was just that we weren’t getting enough traffic. And man, we just spent thousands of dollars, thousands of hours, with not only Becca and I, but our entire team, trying to build this thing that really never took, got off the ground. And, but Amazon continued to churn out more and more revenue for us, because we would, we would continue to dip our toe in there. It’s like, all right, it’s maybe time to launch a new product, we would do it, but we could have been much more aggressive. So that is my main mistake and failure that I would want to communicate to everybody. If you’ve already found a very successful like sales channel in a way that you’re, you know, bringing in revenue to the business, like double down on that. Because at the end of the day, everybody talks about this platform risk, right? If you really genuinely think about it, there’s platform risk where ever you go, right, because if you’re running a Shopify site, and you’re getting all of your traffic from, let’s say, Facebook or Instagram ads, well guess who guess where your platform, you know, dependency is now you’re 100% dependent on Facebook and Instagram, continuing to work with you for ever and ever, right? And we know that Facebook had its own challenges with the iOS update a couple years ago, and so on. whatever business you’re running, there’s always going to be platform risk period. That’s it. Like, you can’t do this on your own unless you just have a brick and mortar shop. And anyways, that’s a whole other separate topic of conversation. So if you found something that’s working, double down on it, and keep getting squeezed all the juice that you can out of it. And guess what, if something does happen down the road, as an entrepreneur, you’re probably creative enough to go pivot, and go find the next sales channel, or go find the next stream of, you know, leads that are going to come into your business. So recommendation is just like, double down on what’s working. And don’t think that you have to diversify and go create something from scratch.
Chad Franzen 10:43
So when you say double down, what would that have looked like for you, rather than, you know, doing all this other work and all these other places? What would doubling down have looked like for you with regard to Amazon?
Josh Hadley 10:54
Yeah, that’s a great question. So doubling down on Amazon, for us at that time would have meant not creating a Shopify site, not worrying about a blog, not worrying about adding this extra revenue stream of digital products that we thought was amazing, right? It would have been just focusing on Amazon, making our content on Amazon the best because to be honest with you, when we launched on Amazon, it was just a bunch of like, you know, Photoshop product images that now I look back on, and my wife and I cringe like, Ooh, okay, I’m surprised they sold as well as they did. Because those listings, it’s themselves, were not very impressive. But what’s funny is like, we spent countless hours working on perfecting our website, the design was perfect. We had taken like professional lifestyle photos of like our family and different products. And like, we did all of that, for the wrong sales channel, like I’m sure our conversions would have been better on Amazon had, we actually put time into those listings to make them look better, number one, and then number two would have been continuing to launch new products on Amazon. So keep finding new ideas, keep creating new products, and keep launching on Amazon. That’s been the story of our successes, like product launch after product launch after product launch. And we continue to find niches that we can be successful in. And so that’s what I would go back and do is double down on Amazon by finding new products, creating those new products, and then actually perfecting those listings, making them the best that they could possibly be.
Chad Franzen 12:33
So I think a lot of people kind of think like content marketing or blogging is going to be valuable for you. Are you saying that it’s not? Are you just saying that in your case, you were already successful on Amazon, no need to do all this extra work to start something else. But blogging could still be a good thing?
Josh Hadley 12:48
Yeah, I definitely think like content marketing definitely has a play, right? If you can send external traffic to Amazon. I mean, Amazon’s loving that right now. And your organic ranking will shoot through the roof if you’re continuing to feed the Amazon beast from external traffic. So is it a good idea? Yes. But as I looked at my core set of strengths and abilities, like I have never created a blog in my life, right? And we don’t have, I’m not a copywriter. My wife’s not a copywriter, like so we didn’t necessarily have somebody on the team that was going to be this like copywriter for us. So this is this massive undertaking for us. If I really wanted to go back, and so right now, if I wanted to create a content site, for hat for our business, then what I would do is I would go acquire somebody else, I would go acquire a blog, I would go acquire a media, like if I wanted a big Facebook group, that’s my target market, I would go acquire that rather than spending countless time and hours invested in trying to figure this out from scratch, you can much more efficiently. Go acquire somebody bring that into your business, and just keep doing what you’re really good at. That flywheel spins a lot faster. And I want our guests to go back. I interviewed Roland Frasier on our podcast. And he talked a lot about acquiring content sites. I mean, he ran the gamut of acquiring businesses. So if you’re looking for advice on acquiring businesses, I would definitely go listen to Roland Frasier’s episode.
Chad Franzen 14:26
Yeah, another mistake that you mentioned that you made was, you felt like you hired people, but you didn’t give them clearly defined roles? Kind of take me back and tell me what that looks like at the time.
Josh Hadley 14:37
Yeah, so again, it’s it’s the whole mistake that we made with trying to diversify our income. Right. So this was 2019. Okay. And in 2019, we had we were working with a business coach. And she was like, yeah, if you guys want to run faster, like you should probably if you want to grow more, you should go hire people. Well, here’s the mistake. just saying you should go hire people is not necessarily the right answer, you need to clearly know, who should I hire? Why should I hire them? And how is this going to free up my time, so that I can go do more revenue generating activities. Okay. So instead, what we did is we just hired on a bunch of expenses to ourselves. And we’ll talk about what those were. But we didn’t have like clearly defined roles that said, this is what needs to happen. These, this is your day to day responsibilities. And this is what success looks like for you in your role. So instead, what we did is, we obviously needed help finding external traffic to grow our Shopify site, right. So what I did is I tried to hire away this problem that we had. And so we paid close to six figure salary for somebody to come in. That was our marketing manager. And ideas were just bouncing all over the place, and nothing was ever like really sticking. It’s like, hey, we want to grow our revenue here on Shopify. And anything that we really tested out, like, nothing really got the ball rolling there. And so we ended up letting that marketing manager go, you know, less than a year, I think she had been around for nine months, no fault of her own, I think she was a smart and capable person. But me as a business leader, like I made the mistake, I hired the wrong person. Not that she was the wrong person. But I hired the wrong person for our business. We didn’t need a marketing manager at that time, what we needed was more of like a project manager, right, that would have freed up my time, instead of me having to go and think all these marketing ideas like I could have somebody running the day to day operations of the business at the time, which would have freed me up to go find more revenue generating opportunities. The other thing we did is we hired two graphic designers. And again, why did we hire two graphic designers? Well, because we had to build up our Shopify site, we didn’t need the graphic designers for our Amazon business, we said, we need more hands on, we’re not generating enough sales on our Shopify site, because we don’t have a big enough selection. So let’s go get more let’s add thousands and thousands of product designs. So here again, we just invested, you know, it was more than six figures for when you combine both of those salaries together for those graphic designers. And really quickly, it was within three to six months, I realized, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, what are we doing? We’re investing all of this money into a side of our business. That’s not sustaining itself, right? Like, why are we siphoning off our money that we’re making from Amazon, and then throwing it away, basically, at this other business, that’s not going anywhere, after three years of, of work and effort, right. So those, those were a couple of my mistakes. So to the audience, what I would say is, like, before you hire somebody, the biggest mistake is like so many people just say, hey, I need to go, marketing is my issue. I don’t understand marketing. So I’m just gonna go hire it out. That’s a mistake. Because if you’re just hiring something out, because you genuinely don’t know anything about it, number one, you’re probably going to end up with the wrong person that you bring on your team. But number two, like you need to clearly identify what success looks like in that role. So if you’re not familiar with finance, or marketing, or whatever it is that you’re hiring out for, then go learn about it first, get your hands dirty, so that you know enough so that you can hire the right person, and then be able to, you know, go work on extra, you know, revenue generating opportunities for your business. So that, that were was one of my biggest takeaways there from those hiring experiences.
Chad Franzen 19:00
Sure. Do you think you could have known? I mean, looking back, you know, hindsight is always 2020. Do you think looking back on it that you could have known that that was the course you should the route you should have taken rather than the one you did?
Josh Hadley 19:13
Yeah, I mean, as I look back, I definitely know that right. But even if I were to go back to my younger self, right, and that 2019 It’s kind of a combination with that earlier mistake that I talked about in terms of diversifying. We’re not a venture backed company. So if you have a venture backed company, sure you can go hire out a full team, right? And be like, well, we’re not making enough money today. But maybe five years from now, it’s going to be worth it. It’s like we’re not revenue back or we’re not VC backed. So why are we investing money? Six plus figures, you know, up to $200,000 in overhead for a business that’s not even coming close to generating you know, like 20,000 dollars a year. So it’s just coming, like coming to that realization?
Chad Franzen 20:07
And oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned that
Josh Hadley 20:10
that’s basically it just coming to that realization they weren’t. They weren’t helping grow the business.
Chad Franzen 20:15
Sure. Sure. You mentioned that you. Maybe you wished you had hired an operations director rather than a marketing director. And a large part of operations is kind of having processes and, and systems documented and in place, you said one of your big mistakes was waiting too long to document those things, processes and systems. Can you expound on that? A little bit?
Josh Hadley 20:37
Yep. Yeah, and all of these, I think mistakes and failures, just like they add on to one another. And you’ll see kind of the whole thought pattern of how all of this played out. But yeah, waiting too long to document processes. So, hey, I’m willing, and again, this is that whole period of 2017, 2018, 2019. Hey, I’m willing to go invest in hire people to go help this failing side of our business that we thought was going to be revolutionary. But yet, I’m not gonna hire anybody for the business that’s actually producing us revenue, right? Like, that’s the mistake in and of itself. Instead, my mind of my train of thought was, my wife and I have got it handled, we have one, my sister was actually helping us out, we’ve got an extra team member, we have extra pair of hands, they’re helping out, you know, we don’t need to add any more overhead to our Amazon side of the business. We like, let’s keep that very, very profitable. So obviously, you can see the mistake and flaw in that, that logic from the onset. So what I did is I just kept everything to myself, rather than trying to like document the processes of ways that I was finding new products, the ways that we launched the products on Amazon, the ways that we did the keyword research for our products on Amazon, I did all of that myself, because I was too scared to add an extra cost to that side of the business, because I want to keep it profitable, which is just such a mistake in and of itself, right. And so I just held on to things way longer than I needed to. If I were to go back in 2019, the first hire that should have been made would have been a project manager, for me to then document the processes to say, this is how we find new products. This is how we do the keyword research. This is how we launch products. This is how we do our advertising. I need somebody to coordinate all of these moving parts, right. And instead, I kept being the one trying to juggle all the balls in the air. And, again, I think we could have grown so much faster. Had I freed myself, of those, you know, day to day operations, operational tasks, I could have been thinking of new product ideas, I could have even been partnering with other influencers to drive traffic to our Amazon site. There’s so much that I could have been doing that could have grown the business further on the Amazon side that I just held on to things way too long. I was too scared to hire nobody. And also thought, well, this is this is like rocket science. Like there’s no way nobody’s going to be able to figure out like how to find a product on Amazon, because I’m just so good at it. Nobody else can figure out Amazon PPC because I’m just so good at it. Right? Like, again, I’m not the smartest person out there, right? And so those are just some mindset shifts that I really had to cross that. I wish I could tell my younger self that, hey, like, find somebody that can do it. 80, 85, 90% as good as you are as going to be good enough.
Chad Franzen 23:50
Are your processes and systems documented now?
Josh Hadley 23:54
Yeah, they most certainly are. So the biggest change happened in 2020. Right? So this is like I’d say like the most pivotal tipping point in our business was 2020. That’s because COVID hit us right. When COVID hit us, you know, we were doing 1,000-plus orders a day on Amazon. Okay, COVID happens and the world start shutting down. Overnight, our business went from doing over 1000 orders a day down to we were lucky to get like 100 orders a day on Amazon itself. So like we experienced like a 90% drop overnight. So it allowed us to obviously level set. That’s when we said all right, we’re done with this Shopify site. It’s not doing anything for us. We were you know, we had to lay off the person that we had running our blog for us because, again, it wasn’t revenue generating our marketing manager. All of this is like okay, like now we see a little bit more clearly now. Let’s trim off this fat that we had added on to ourselves, and then we scale back and then It was just my wife and I and a couple other assistants. And then we said, Alright, what do we do? Moving forward, right. And so the first thing that I knew I needed to do is like, hey, if we’re gonna double down on Amazon now, right, because the world shut down, like, let’s, let’s start building out more products, we’re not going to launch them yet, because the world’s not ready for that. But that’s when I started to realize, hey, the person I should have been hiring is this operations person that can start coordinating all of that. So at the end of 2020, that’s when I started diligently documenting all of the processes that I was doing, I went through and this was very time intensive, I think it took me about three months. But I diligently went through recorded training videos and also type stuff up in a Word doc. And laid out, here are the steps that I’m taking. Here’s the training that I’ve watched in the past, to go find new products. And then I went and hired somebody to go execute just that specific area of the business, finding new products. And what they ended up doing, was even perfecting my process, even better, sharing better ideas. And I was like, oh, that’s wicked, smart. Like, yeah, let’s add that to our process. So again, here I am holding on to all these processes thinking, I’m the only one who can do it. It’s like, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And hiring somebody with a, you know, coming from a different point of view is able to point out some gaps in my logic and actually make it improve that process. So I was able to do that we hired a project manager. And then I went through and documented. Here’s how we go from an idea, all the way to product launch. There’s a lot of moving parts in our business. But this is how we do it. And let’s start coordinating the different team members that can do that. So yes, today, I would argue like nearly I would say, 90% of our processes that we have in our business, are documented there on a training platform, like a video platform that like whenever we onboard new team members, they go in and they’re able to watch kind of like a college course in a way, training videos that walk them through step by step, what their role is what they need to be doing. And then each time somebody is hired in that role, they always add to those processes. And we update training videos. And so it’s kind of the snowball effect where our processes are getting better and better and more efficient. As time goes by.
Chad Franzen 27:36
You, you mentioned that you felt when you when you started, you felt like you had to hire people at the cheapest rate possible. I think that’s I think that’s pretty common. You know, I’ve seen job postings where it’s a new business, and they’re like, we’re just taking unpaid interns for now. But you’ll get a lot of great experience. Tell me about your thought process regarding hiring people and how much they should be paid and, and why and what that looks like.
Josh Hadley 27:58
Yeah, that? That’s such a great question. And obviously, it’s very, you know, context specific, every business is probably at a different point. But let me share with you kind of where we were at, in our business, you know, the revenue and what we were doing. And some of the hires that we were trying to make it at different rates. So, back in 2019, is when we really wanted to try to like build out our team, like I mentioned, we had hired all these, you know, staff members from the US. And then we also wanted to go hire some more virtual assistants, right from like the Philippines. Now, we were doing so in 2019, I think we did close to $6 million in revenue on Amazon. Okay. So we were doing well. And we could certainly afford to, you know, we had, honestly up until 2019, then my wife and I, and my sister as our assistant, like up until 2019. So we had made it a long way, like a couple years on Amazon, at least, like I mentioned, 2017, we hit a million dollars on Amazon 2018 was I think 3.5, and then 2019 was 6 million. Okay, that entire journey, we did that on our own. So one thing I would say to our audience that’s listening, if you’re just crossing that seven figure mark, or if you’re still in that six figure mark, like you probably still need to put in a little bit more sweat equity, right? Everybody wants to go to that next level tomorrow. But sometimes it’s really good to just like keep pushing and doing what you know you need to do. Let it grow a little bit bigger, document your processes along the way, and then make one hire at a time that can unlock more time for you. Okay, so if you are starting at that six, seven, you know, low seven figure number. Obviously cost is a big You know, portion of who you’re going to hire. So many people out there, tout, hey, I got a Filipino VA for three bucks now or I got him for four bucks an hour. And I kind of like laugh at that now. Because after going through and I have, genuinely I think we’ve had over probably at this point 10,000 different Filipinos apply to our different positions that we’ve hired for over the last five years. And when I first started out, I was like, oh, yeah, I gotta find somebody that’s in that three to $4 range. And, you know, the type of talent that’s at that three to $4 range, that there’s a reason why they’re, they’re charging the rates that they’re charging, right. But if you can, you know, even getting up to like that six $7 range, you’re going to get even better, more experienced individuals. Now, there are some hidden gems that you can find when we, when we initially hired a few VAs from the Philippines, we hired probably like two or three that very quickly, within like a couple months, didn’t work out. And they were at the lower end of that pay range, obviously. But we did stumble upon a couple that we still use today that are great, that have been excellent VAs for our business. But we had to do 10 times the amount of interviews and work to end up weeding out and finding those, those two that have been able to stick around. So in 2020, when we got a little more serious with like, hey, alright, we know that we need more like experienced talent on our team. That’s when I was like, hey, maybe we should start looking at the $10 and above range. Right. And, and again, this is specific to the Filipinos. And hiring there in the Philippines. That’s where we’ve hired the majority of our team. And I believe it’s a fantastic place, especially for a young business to go and acquire smart talent at very low cost rate. So I would definitely recommend before anybody goes and hires, you know, people here in the US and doesn’t hold W-2 salary and all of that type of stuff. Like you’re signing yourself up for a lot when you do that. But when you’re working with a contractor overseas, you know what you can test it out if it doesn’t work it within a month, okay? On to the next one, it’s a very low barrier to entry. And it’s, you know, very low risk, so to speak. So, going back to that story, though, of you know, who we needed to hire when we need to hire a project manager, and somebody that could do the research and development, I knew that these were more specialized roles. And so we did have to increase the, you know, the pay rate that we were offering. And through that we found some amazing talent. The project manager that we found previously worked for IBM, they’re in the Philippines. So her training and she’s PMP certified. Like, she is just as good as any US based project manager. She has the same certification, she worked for a US based company. But yeah, her rate was about a fourth of what it would be here in the US, right. And then our other team member that we had for research and development, he was also working for a US based firm there in the Philippines. And they were trying to court him to actually move to the US at that time. And we were able to pick him up and he has been a very, very good hire for us. But none of those those
I guess team members were cheap, you know, when you compare it to somebody that’s arguing, oh, I found a $3. Va over in the Philippines. It’s like well, yeah, that’s that’s great for you. I hope they’re working out well. But when you go through the process and and you actually look at somebody’s experience, what they have to offer their background, sometimes it’s definitely it’s it’s better to hire those more experienced individuals.
Chad Franzen 34:10
A common have you found like cross cultural barriers to be when you know, when kind of hiring out in the Philippines and things like that, places like that.
Josh Hadley 34:19
Yeah, so honestly, I haven’t found many issues with the cultural aspect of hiring people in the Philippines. And the reason for that is because many of the team members that we’ve hired, they’ve previously worked for US based companies. So they are very acclimated to the way things work in the US. I know the timezone is very different, obviously. It’s about 13 hours. There are 13 hours ahead, right now. And so they’re working, you know, their daytime is our nighttime and vice versa. But many of those team members, like I mentioned, they’ve been working for BPO’s is what they call them they’re in the Philippines. And that’s where they work for these large, you know, multinational firms like IBM, Procter and Gamble, Coca Cola, all of those guys. And we were able to, you know, approach them and see that, hey, like, the way they speak, the way they communicate is just as the same or very similar to the way somebody in the US would be able to communicate to us.
Chad Franzen 35:28
The final mistake that you kind of highlighted when we first started, was that you, you weren’t you don’t feel like you were as unique or original as you wished you would have been? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Josh Hadley 35:40
Yeah. So this goes back to like when we first started launching products on Amazon itself. And so at the time, again, we were just testing different stuff out. And I believe that everybody goes through a period of like, learning and growth on Amazon. But any recommendation I would give to anybody that’s considering launching new products, whether they’re on Amazon or anywhere else. What we did was we just looked at, hey, what’s the best seller on Amazon doing? What does their product look like? And obviously, if, if their product successful, let’s just go create another one that looks just like it and launch it on Amazon? Well, if you do that, then guess what happens? It’s just a race to the bottom, whoever can price it out the cheapest, let alone the fact that if you go and copy somebody else, you can run into copyright issues, design, patent issues, utility patent issues, obviously. And so number one, it’s not a good, you know, it’s not a great place to start from for those illegal reasons to begin with. But then number two, like you’re dipping your toe in this kind of like saturated market, where you’re going to go compete with somebody now that already has thousands of reviews, and you haven’t really made your product offering that much more unique or differentiated. And so that’s one of the things that we’re, I would say, argue like, we’re one of the best when it comes to finding unique designs. Now. That’s one of our greatest strengths for our business. But that was a realization that that took place fairly early on, I think it was probably like, I think the second or third product that we launched, like, we literally like, we changed up some of the words but like, it was very similar like me to product. And I was like, Why is this not being successful? And then it was honestly my wife that’s like, Hey, I think I could design something better, like you just told me to create this. But I think I could actually make it better. And so that’s what we ended up doing is going and recreating something entirely different and new. And then bam, we have success, we start beating out that that top seller in that category. It’s like, Okay, that’s it, like why we wasted, you know, a few $1,000 Investing in inventory. But it was a good lesson learned that it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna go compete and get into a new market, so to speak, we’ve got to go create something that’s unique, original. And there’s so many different things that you can tap into, in terms of inspiration for creative ideas, I would definitely go look at Pinterest, I would definitely go look at Etsy, I would go look at other sales channels, and see what is doing well in some of those other sales channels, even Google Shopping, right. And then you can take bits and pieces from all of those different sales channels and kind of create your own based off of the inspiration that you’ve got from lots of other, you know, sellers, or similar type of products, that can add a lot of inspiration. So it’s as simple as that. Don’t go copy somebody else’s work. Number one, that’s That’s not cool. But then number two, go and go and take the time to create something unique, you’re you’ll be able to know if you hit it hit the nail on the head real quickly. But it’s iteration after iteration. And that’s where a real business is built.
Chad Franzen 39:14
Did you or your wife know at the time that you could have come up with better ideas even before and you were just doing it? Because he thought it was a good business idea to kind of join the crowd? Or did you realize that she kind of realized later like, I can do better than this?
Josh Hadley 39:28
Yeah, it was definitely the ladder. And I think that’s because she was just kind of relying on me, you know, to say, Hey, I found this product idea and we were brand new to Amazon, right? Like prior to that my wife and I were running our custom wedding invitation business. So my wife was still working with a lot of like custom wedding clients, or custom wedding invitation clients at the time. And so honestly, like, we were just exploring Amazon dipping our toes in the water, and she was just relying on me to like, hey, what what do you need? I’m willing to support this initiative. Let’s see if it goes anywhere. And it wasn’t until like, I was like, Ah, this is really struck like, I don’t know what success here. My wife’s like, well, it’s to be honest with you. It’s pretty ugly. I just did what you told me to do, because that’s what you told me to do. She’s like, but I think we could make it look a lot cuter. And I liked that you kind of mentioned like joining the crowd, right? It’s not that we intentionally copied like the best seller, like everybody in that category looked the exact same, like, there were 10s 20, like different competitors, that all looked nearly identical, right? So that’s the mistake in ourselves, like, we should have been like, why do we want to join the 20? Right? Why do we want to look just like the other 20 do? And instead, you know, come out with something that’s completely different, looks original. And then we’re the one. And that’s where all the eyeballs went after that.
Chad Franzen 41:02
Would you say it’s scary to kind of like, well, obviously, somebody has already thought of this before. So it must not be that successful? Is that why people don’t do it? Or they just not realize that they can do better?
Josh Hadley 41:13
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s definitely a combination of both. We still debate that number of times in our business today, whenever we’re going into new product categories. It’s like, hey, is there a reason why a farmhouse design, for example, isn’t in this, you know, children’s bedroom? area? Right? Is there a reason for that? Or is that a gap in the market? So you know, the thing that I have learned is that whatever I do think in my mind, if I think, Hey, this is gonna crush it, this is a completely original design, this is a gap in the market. Typically, I’m proven exactly wrong. So what I think we’ve learned from that process, most importantly, is that you need to just create your minimum viable product, get it launched, and see what happens. So working with a manufacturer, and this is maybe a secret tip, or, you know, one that I would share with the audience is when you’re working with a manufacturer, try to get really low MOQ. And that’s what’s allowed us to like create 1000s, you know, we have over 1300 SKUs right now, the only way we’ve been able to amass that, that high number of skews is the fact that, like, we’re able to test things very cheaply, like we’re talking about, like 25 unit orders, just to test it out. And then it’s like, oh, this was successful. Okay, now, let’s, let’s go print 1000 of them now, right? And so that like just testing iterating, and be like, Well, I think this work, this one was close, but maybe we could combine the two or whatever. So it’s always being able to pivot, but testing stuff out, throwing it out to the market, and seeing how they respond.
Chad Franzen 42:58
So as we kind of wrap things up here, what’s maybe a broad takeaway, or primary lesson that you’d like to have your listeners learn from these mistakes, you felt like you had to diversify your sales channels for your business, you hired people without clearly defined roles, waited too long to document processes and systems, you felt like you had to hire people at the cheapest rate possible. And then you weren’t particularly unique and original, with some of your offerings when you started, maybe what’s what’s kind of a big takeaway that people should should have?
Josh Hadley 43:29
Yep, I’ll kind of sum it up into like, the way I think the ideal process should have looked like for our business going back in time, right. So when we initially found success on Amazon, we should have doubled down on Amazon. And we should have just said, Hey, all right, if we’re going to invest in resources for Amazon, or for our team, it’s going to serve our amazon marketplace where we are finding great success right now, then that leads into not being scared to go and actually hire people to support something that is making you money, right? Thank you should never be scared to go hire for a particular role, if that particular role that you’re going to hire for is to support further growth in that channel, right. So document your processes, and then go hire out that role. And while you’re at it, don’t be scared or think that I have to go get the dirt dirt cheap rate. Go goes, maybe spend a little bit more if your budget is like three bucks an hour, I would argue, you know, you should go try and double that right? Go to $6 an hour. Go see what candidates you can find there. offload your processes to them, let them go and refine your processes and improve them in fact, and then as your business continues to grow, then you can go get more experienced individuals, right? You could go get people that cost even more money. And I believe that that’s kind of the nature of the way business works, right? The team that got you here is probably not going to be the team that gets you there, right? A team that gets you from, you know, maybe six to seven figures, probably not the same type of talent that you need to go from seven to eight. And then if you want to go from eight to nine figures, you’re gonna need a whole new team with a different set of capabilities, because they’re going to be different challenges that the team that got you from, let’s say, seven to eight, has no experience with so that would be kind of like my summation of like going back in time. That’s the way the ideal process would work. I wish our business could have followed that process. But I hope you know, our listeners are able to take away a few bits and pieces that they’re able to apply into their own business, to be able to overcome a lot of those kind of no easy mistakes or silly mistakes that I made along the way.
Chad Franzen 45:58
Absolutely. Hey, Josh has been great talking to you. Great information. Great insight. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks, Chad. So long, everybody.
