Kusha is an Inc 500 entrepreneur with a remarkable history of launching and exiting several 7- and 8-figure e-commerce businesses. With over a decade of experience in scaling brands on Amazon, Kusha has mastered the art of driving sales through advanced marketing strategies, data analysis, and impactful branding. His recent venture, Kazam, a revolutionary AI-Based SaaS tool, is transforming the way Amazon advertising campaigns are optimized, offering users significant profitability and organic ranking improvements.

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In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Kusha, an Inc. 500 entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in e-commerce. Kush shares his journey of building and selling three Amazon-based brands, emphasizing the importance of product differentiation, effective PPC advertising, and leveraging AI. He discusses sourcing strategies, the value of design patents, and the significance of iterative product improvement. Kush also highlights the benefits of diversifying sales channels and building an email list. This episode offers actionable insights for scaling e-commerce businesses to eight figures and beyond.

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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 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 Cordova’s and Michael Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I’m speaking with Kush and he is going to be talking about how he sold three E-com brands and the lessons learned of how you can scale your own brand to eight figures and beyond. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure companies to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a partner who can help take your business to the next level, my team and I bring the hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough. That’s ecom with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality. But today I’m super excited to introduce you all to Kush.

Josh 00:00:46  Kush is an Inc 500 entrepreneur with a remarkable history of launching and exiting several seven and eight figure ecommerce businesses. With over a decade of experience in scaling brands on Amazon, Kush has mastered the art of driving sales through advanced marketing strategies, data analysis, and impactful branding. His recent recent venture, Shazam! A revolutionary AI based SaaS tool, is transforming the way Amazon advertising campaigns are optimized, offering users significant profitability and organic ranking improvements. So with that introduction, welcome to the show.

Kusha 00:01:15  Thanks for having me.

Josh 00:01:18  excited to have you on. And I’m really excited to learn more about, you know, how you built and exited three different Amazon based brands. So if you wouldn’t mind, maybe provide a little bit of background about yourself and about the three brands that you built and sold.

Kusha 00:01:30  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, started my Amazon journey over a decade ago, and our first product was called the BFR for something called blood flow Restriction Training. And you know, back then we didn’t really Shopify wasn’t as big.

Kusha 00:01:41  And we didn’t know anything about rebels or, you know, how to drive traffic. So we just then listed on Amazon and it’s slowly started selling. And then over the course of a couple of years, it really ramped up to be, you know, full fledged full time business that we focused on solely, and getting a good sense of, like Amazon and how that works and how to drive traffic and how to build products. And we ended up actually launching a separate brand to eight figures in revenue and then sold it at the end of 2019. And then during the pandemic, during 2020, you know, we saw a big peak with health and fitness, a lot of people buying home workout stuff. So we ended up selling our BFR brand separately as well. It did and sold that portfolio brands in 2021, trying to do the same thing again and built another, you know, multiple seven figure brand or a couple brands really that we’re selling on Amazon now, as well as some other ventures like our software, our VPC and such.

Josh 00:02:28  That that’s fascinating and that’s amazing. Like, it seems like you have a great track record of continuing to come out with new brands, being able to scale those. So I’m curious, what would you say is kind of like, what’s the magic touch that you have? Or like, why do you feel like you’ve been able to have such high success rates with the different brands that you’ve been working in? Is it the product differentiation? Is it you know, you just time the market correctly, or are there other secret hacks that you have going on in your brands that you’re able to implement that you could share with our audience?

Kusha 00:02:54  Well, I’d say it’s a bit of both, really. for the competence wellness, because I know health and fitness very, very well. It’s been in my background for a long time, and so I try to stay in that area. If I were to get into maybe office products or something, that I don’t obsess with that. So that’s part of it. The other part of it is, yeah, differentiating, creating custom products.

Kusha 00:03:09  You know, we don’t really do much private label. We do a lot of customization, custom molds and a way to make our products better and intellectual property around it, not only to make it defensible, but also just adds a lot more value and more stability, perceived stability to the buyer when you want to sell.

Josh 00:03:22  Awesome, because obviously you’ve got like the Midas touch or magic bullet of some sorts that’s helping you be able to scale three different brands and being able to exit them really well. So tell me more about what what you think is like the differentiator. There’s been other people that fail, but you seem to, you know, do really well, whether it’s product selection or whether it’s, you know, finding a, you know, a new niche that isn’t yet super saturated with competition. What do you feel like is the differentiation that has allowed you to succeed so often with these different brands?

Kusha 00:03:49  Yeah, I think the key is, you know, the staying in our circle of competence. So staying in health and wellness, which I know very well so I can have a little bit more of an edge in that category.

Kusha 00:03:56  And then also always looking to differentiate with just some product improvements and intellectual property, custom molds and tooling, not just selling the exact same thing as everyone else.

Josh 00:04:05  I think that that can make a huge difference in any brand. And I think that product differentiation, and especially if you can incorporate some IP into it, can go a long ways. I’m curious, did you do anything on the traffic side of things to help promote these brands? Like were you doing influencer partnerships? Was there off Amazon traffic that was helping, or was it primarily just, you know, capitalizing the traffic that was already on Amazon?

Kusha 00:04:27  Yeah, with one of the brands, you know, I think 50% of our revenue is Shopify. So we were driving a lot of traffic through Facebook, Facebook and Instagram back then. we weren’t driving traffic to Amazon, but I’m sure we were getting a good overflow and halo effect to Amazon that benefited us. but yeah, the other brands, it was 100% Amazon. We weren’t driving any traffic outside of Amazon.

Kusha 00:04:46  So the only things we were doing really was just PPC. PPC was a big part of, I think, and I think becoming more important today. But it was a big part of, I think, why we were successful, you know, with our products. And again, it’s the things we went after weren’t as competitive. when we, when we got into those categories. So I think timing was a big part of it, you know, getting into like a massage gun space now would be a lot harder. Back then there was a four competitors. Now there’s 4000.

Josh 00:05:07  That obviously makes a big difference. And you touched on this briefly, but you talked about how PPC has been, you know, a real big advantage. And that’s what you focused on especially with the last two brands. So what is it that you’re seeing with PPC that’s helping you get ranked when you launch a new product? And how does that help you stay ranked moving forward?

Kusha 00:05:24  Yeah. So Amazon, you know they’re taking in a lot of data about relevance product relevance.

Kusha 00:05:30  And so when someone goes and does a search find buy like if they’re searching organically for a keyword and they find your product and buy it, that’s obviously going to play a role in the overall algorithm for where you rank, for that search term on the page. But PPC does as well. And PPC is becoming, I think, weighted even higher in my opinion, than where it was even before. I think it’s becoming more and more important over time. so what I found, just in my experience and from talking to other Amazon sellers, if you’re not running PPC, generally what happens is if you just purely rely on, you might start losing rankings or slowly dipping. whereas PPC can maintain and sustain those rankings. and it’s almost a necessity to sustain your ranking. So PPC has become an integral part of launching and sustaining rankings for any product.

Josh 00:06:09  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Tell me. And again, this is the interesting thing about PPC. If you ask 100 different PPC consultants or agencies their strategy for succeeding with Amazon advertising, you’re going to get 100 different like strategies and responses.

Josh 00:06:21  So what’s kind of your approach with Amazon advertising? Tell me about like the campaign types that you’re activating, what you’re seeing working now and, you know, tips to help our listeners succeed as well?

Kusha 00:06:31  Yeah, I think the key thing is really every category and every product is different. So, you know, what we do is we try to take in, but we might start with some research campaigns like auto campaigns and even some manual campaigns that are really designed for us to do some research first, and then those will then slowly take the data and take the customer search terms and then convert those into something more specific. So for example, we might take the automatic campaign, take those winning customer search terms and then campaign with broad phrase and exact. In the past, we found exact to be a little bit higher priority, but now we’re finding exact match tends to be more expensive. So phrase match. And maybe in that case. So we’ll launch things like that for research. And then we find that type of search in general.

Kusha 00:07:11  You know I might I might focus more on top of search with a multiplier bit multiplier for having the system prioritize top of search. But that’s not always the case. There are some cases where a product may be doing better with just a mix of top of search and other placements, so we kind of let the system optimize for that. And and then we take the data and then, you know, with our software example for example, we’ll do this automatically. So we don’t do this manually, but it will automatically figure out you know, which placements going to do best and then kind of prioritize from there. But I would say in general top of search is going to be more favorable, especially if you’re trying to focus on organic ranking in improving your Amazon rankings. and then looking at your competition, you know, do you have like a like buy like competitor. So you have similar competitors to you that you want to hedge against, and that you design some kind of improvement upon, then those ones would be the ones you might want to do some display campaigns, some offensive campaigns, also defensive campaigns, and then doing some sponsored product product page campaigns on those competitors as well.

Kusha 00:08:03  And if you have a good assortment, if you have a good mix of SKUs, and it’s not just like one hero, but you have maybe some variations and there may be different listings, that sort of thing. You could really capitalize and dominate the real estate of those of those ad placements when you have those different product spaces.

Josh 00:08:20  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. What would you see. Do you feel like you have any case study, whether it be clients you’ve worked with that you’ve seen you know what’s working today with the Amazon. Like you know here’s some maybe things that you’re seeing mistakes people make and maybe some successes of like, hey, when we doubled down on top of search, we always see a lift in organic rankings or whatever it may be like. Do you have a list of case studies that we can dive into?

Kusha 00:08:43  Yeah. So, you know, I have some clients we work with as well. And, you know, and from what I’m saying, focusing on, like I said, type of search I would say has worked best like I’ve been putting, you know, probably 100% or 200%, multiplier towards top of search.

Kusha 00:08:56  And that has seemed to pan out very well from not only just a cost standpoint, but your, you know, total cost or taco’s that that has worked out very, very well for pretty much all of our clients. I don’t know of a single case where it hasn’t provided the best results so far. but you know, like I said, it’s a case by case basis, so there may be a case where, maybe you don’t want to just focus on top of search. I would assume maybe in cases where, you know, you want to just have more brand awareness, more top of funnel, then you may want to have other placements as well and other ad types. But yeah, focusing we’ve been heavily focusing probably 80%, you know, sponsored products has been our budget. we’ve been putting a lot of the ad dollars towards sponsor products and less towards sponsor display and sponsored, brand video or the storefront, things like that haven’t been putting as much attention. They’re mostly just focusing on sponsor products.

Josh 00:09:38  Awesome. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. what else are you doing? Do you see, you know, video ads working well or what type of things do you see, you know, becoming more and more important as Amazon, I think, wants more advertising dollars from us. Right. So like what do you see? Where do you see the puck going in terms of ads over the next few years?

Kusha 00:09:59  Yeah, I think it’s going to be a lot like these other platforms like TikTok or meta, where you need to test a variety of creative. And I think AI is going to play a bigger role in making that more accessible, because obviously for a lot of sellers, it can be, you know, not only time consuming but expensive to get video creatives, which for some platforms like TikTok, you really need a ton of creatives to be successful with TikTok. And so I think Amazon is going to become like that too, where maybe you don’t need like dozens of creatives, but you need more than one or 2 to 1 for that product.

Kusha 00:10:29  And I think I already kind of seeing this now with Amazon, where they’re starting to leverage more AI to build creative assets for you, pretty much seeing that with everything. Even Canva now uses AI of an AI tool in there. You can design things faster for images and such. So I think that, you know, moving forward, I think just having a broader set of creatives that are going to try to launch more video ads and then also launching, you know, making sure that you have, you know, captions on those videos because most people aren’t going to be listening to the audio.

Josh 00:10:55  I think those are good tips. And I think that Amazon does want to double down on the video aspect. Right? I think you see, you know, Amazon trying to like figure out like what TikTok is doing, trying to replicate that in their own way. They have that inspire, you know, kind of feature on the app and things like that. So I think that at the end of the day, Amazon does want more videos.

Josh 00:11:13  You see them testing out videos even when you’re just searching, going through the search pages. Sometimes you see, you know, the main image is actually like a video that automatically starts playing as you scroll down the search results. So I like that as well. I’m curious what, what else do you see Amazon doubling down on over the next 5 to 10 years? You know, you’ve seen the marketplace evolve quite a bit. And I think that today it’s never been more competitive than it ever has been on Amazon. And you mentioned it with a couple of your brands. Like part of it was, you know, good timing and things like that. So what are your recommendations and advice that you’re giving to other sellers right now to stay on top of the market, to be able to compete with all of the low cost competition that’s coming in from overseas?

Kusha 00:11:54  Yeah, I think AI is going to be a very, very valuable tool. And I think the sellers that, you know, utilize AI best in their businesses, I think are the ones who are going to probably succeed the most.

Kusha 00:12:03  and then aside from that, you know, utilizing more differentiation and customization in your products, not just relying on private label, like I, you know, I used to focus more on private label in the beginning, but, you know, pretty much like I said, now we only solely do custom products just for the fact that, you know, we’re seeing so many Chinese factories selling direct on Amazon and it’s hard to compete with them on price if we’re selling a commodity. So we’re selling kind of the same exact thing, or if it’s kind of a commoditized product, then we’re never going to succeed. So I try to avoid selling products like that, or even categories where maybe the customer doesn’t even really, even if you do make an improvement, they don’t really care and they just want whatever is going to be cheapest. I try to avoid categories and niches like that, and try to focus more on categories where, you know, customers may want the product that is a little bit better, or maybe it just has some certifications and some trust behind it that make it more trustworthy than buying from maybe, let’s say, a Chinese seller who they don’t know, like, does this have toxins in it? Does it have BPA? Does it have PFAS? You know what? What kind of toxins am I going to be putting in my body if if I buy this product from China, that sort of thing.

Kusha 00:12:56  So, definitely differentiation. But I really do think AI is a big part of I think where everything’s headed. I think that I’ve seen a lot of investors talking about, you know, obviously people have kind of a bearish view of where equities will go. But, you know, I think that equities may see an economic boom as a result of AI. You know, you see meta running all kinds of ads for the meta AI. And I think that a lot of these companies are going to become much more profitable and create new potential revenue streams as a result of integrating AI. So I think we may actually see an economic boom as a result, probably with like what the economy saw with the internet boom and what the economy saw with maybe the, you know, motor vehicle boom, you know, so I think with each generation we see something new that could potentially catapult businesses to a new level. So I think is a great way. I don’t think you need to get lost too much in the weeds and I because there’s so many different tools.

Kusha 00:13:40  But I think using it to improve your copywriting or just speeding up the process of copywriting for getting your listings launched, improving your creatives and maybe reducing your costs for creatives. I really like, you know, the idea of creating a minimum viable product. So before you go and do all this investment into your product, getting photo shoots and all this stuff, get the product up and running, you know, as best you can with the least amount of capital that you can, you know, obviously want to do it right. You don’t want it to look cheap. But if you can have something using AI in terms of your, photo creatives for your main carousel and your A+ images, I would test with that first, get the product selling, make some money, and then have the product basically pay for itself for its own improvements. take that cash flow, reinvest it then into a photo shoot or some good video assets or UGC, etc..

Josh 00:14:23  Yeah, I love that recommendation. I do agree that, you know, that minimum viable product, I think is so essential to just kind of get things out there and to just test the waters.

Josh 00:14:32  And again, I think that the number one lever for any Amazon based brand is like new product development. So the more quickly you can come to market and you can test out the market and then double down on those that are winning. I think that’s where you’re going to succeed in the long term because like you mentioned, like being able to create, you know, custom unique products that are differentiated, I think is the end all, be all. As you’ve worked with different clients and you’ve had a lot of experience, as you said, like shifting away from just like putting a private label on top of another existing product. what are some ideas? Give us some more ideas of ways that you approach product differentiation. And how do you come up with, you know, innovative product ideas where you could maybe find a pen or a design pen? can you give us some ideas there?

Kusha 00:15:11  Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is things that I might use myself. So, you know, if I see something that it’s in the health and wellness space and I’ve already been kind of using a product, like that, or if I’ve already been kind of familiar with that type of product, then I already kind of know what the pain points are, because I’m kind of I’m the end user.

Kusha 00:15:26  And so I think that’s where, you know, staying in your circle of competence, you know, I think is a big part of it because if you kind of venture outside of that, it becomes hard to have that insider’s knowledge to understand the customer at the same level of depth as when you are the end customer. So because I am kind of end customer for my own products, I have a good sense of, you know, what are the pain points? And then obviously you can do your own research with various tools and look at the reviews and look at, okay, what are these, you know, negative reviews saying, I like looking at the three star reviews because I feel like it was the most honest. And one stars can be fake, or they can just be negative people that just complain about everything. But three stars are very honest because these are people who like the product, but there was something missing. So three star reviews on your competitors products can give you an idea of what was missing, what you can improve upon, and you can use those for your, you know, design improvements in the beginning.

Kusha 00:16:11  And then when you’re getting your patents, design patents are easier to enforce on Amazon, in my opinion, than utility patents. Utility patents will make your business more valuable and create just a greater sense of invincibility overall. But it will be more expensive to enforce and a little bit harder. But with Amazon, design times are pretty straightforward as long as it’s not too narrow. I’ve had some cases where, you know, maybe it looks too specific to the product and then someone else kind of designs something, easily designs around it, that sort of thing. Then I found that it’s a little bit more difficult for Amazon to enforce it, and you have to get an attorney involved and then it gets a little more expensive, that sort of thing. But when it comes to design patents, you know, when you talk to your attorney and you, the first step is you want to make sure to have them do the research first. So they have to first look at the prior art and then use that to list what the you know, what the prior art is on your patent application.

Kusha 00:16:53  In most cases, when I’m doing design patents or even utility patents, I like to try to pay extra to expedite it. Otherwise it could take forever to get it. design patents, you know, if you do something called. I think it’s called Rocket Docket. you pay extra. I can’t remember how much it is. Maybe it’s like $500,000 extra, but you’ll get basically a determination within, like maybe 3 or 4 months. I’ve even seen some as fast as a couple of months. You’ll get an office action and designs are a little bit easier to get approved. Like with the utility patent, you’re almost always guaranteed to get like a non final rejection initially. And so you have to then spend another several thousand dollars, have your attorney write something up and then write his rebuttal to that whatever. But with a design patent, you know, if it is unique then I’ve seen in most cases most of our design patents they like, they don’t reject it on the first time they accept it and then it registers.

Kusha 00:17:32  So if you do the rocket docket and all that, it might you might get it for months. especially if you have rejections and you get back to them quickly, you’ll probably have it registered within less than 12 months. So it’s very fast. But yeah, my point with that is when you’re doing Rocket Docket or I think maybe it’s called track patterns. you it’s required, I believe, to submit, you know, an extensive prior art search. So you have to pay your attorney a little bit extra to include, you know, a search of all the prior art, with the application. and so when you do that, you may find that when your attorney first gets back to you before they file the application, they’re going to get back to you with the search results. And they may say, hey, here’s what we found. Here’s some things that are a little concerning because they do look very similar to your product, whatever. or they may come back and say, yeah, we don’t see anything that we think is a big concern so we can proceed as is.

Kusha 00:18:14  if the thing is concerning, then you can decide, do I want to, you know, refine this a little bit more generally when you’re doing design patents that you make claims is with solid lines. So when you, you know, have a drawing, anything in solid lines is what you’re claiming is your design. If there’s dashed lines, those dashed lines are things you’re not claiming. So a lot of times the attorney might try to make the application a little bit more broad and make things with, you know, more dashed lines and less solid lines, because then you’re not claiming every intricate detail of your product. But, you know, if you see in the prior art search, or maybe if you get an office action where they reject it based on some prior art, then you might want to, you know, tweak that and focus more on making it a little bit more specific to your product, or maybe even tweaking the product if you haven’t even launched it yet, or starting your mold or tooling, this might be a good time and and refine it so that you are able to get some ID behind it.

Josh 00:19:02  Yeah, that’s a brilliant overview of, you know, design pants and utility pants and everything that’s involved there. Do you ever use any of like the product testing or like polling software such as like Pig Foo in Tel Aviv or Product Pinion to like, put your ideas out onto the market and get customer feedback? Or are you just generating these ideas solely on your own based off of reading Amazon reviews?

Kusha 00:19:25  I probably should do that more. I mean, my only problem with it I have used glue and these aren’t the actual end customers. So the data’s a little bit, do you know, take a survey. so are these people the actual customers who are interested in this product and care about this product? Usually, no. So I just find that their opinion is, you know, not as valuable as just getting. That’s why I said get the product out there. maybe you want to start with private label. Just get it out there and, you know, buy a minimum amount of units from the factory, like whatever the minimum order quantity is, get it out there, get it up and running, use some AI to get some images and and the minimum product photography.

Kusha 00:19:59  So you don’t spend a lot of time and money just to get it up and running quickly. What needs to be changed and what needs to be improved? Or if you can do a small design improvement that it’s not too a lot of gambles. I mean, I think business, you kind of have to take some educated bets. So we take a lot of bets where we’ll say, you know what, I don’t know for sure if this is going to work, but I have a pretty good idea or it seems logical or very rational that if I, you know, improve this out or the other, that that that’s only going to add value. especially if like, let’s say you’re going to sell something that let’s say you sell you’re going to sell the product where the complaint is that it often breaks and you’re like, okay, my design improvement is I’m just gonna make this thing a little bit thicker. I’m going to make it a little bit more robust. I’m going to make the material a little bit better quality improvements that I don’t really see in most cases, that those kind of improvements are going to backfire on you.

Kusha 00:20:42  It’s not likely that you’re going to do that. You’re going to say, oh my God, I don’t like how this thing is so durable and it lasts so long, you know? So it’s like those logical types of assumptions are pretty safe. So in my opinion, it’s a, you know, fairly safe to take those bets. Just launch it. And then, you know, if that works, you can keep it as is. Or if you think that, hey, you know what? I want to keep improving this then then I would recommend and in most cases we do this where we just continually improve the product and we’ll just keep launching new versions and new variations constantly. We’re always launching new new models of our different products, because every few months we see that, hey, you know what? There’s this product’s good, but there aren’t products to kind of overcome that. So we’ll just launch a whole new series, a whole new model. And and that’s always kind of done well for us.

Kusha 00:21:21  I’ve had other brands in the past where new competitors, you know, come out of nowhere and, you know, sometimes they make inferior products, but sometimes they make products where I’m like, oh, you know what? That’s actually a really good idea. I should have thought of that. And so the competition can inspire me to create something even better. So then it leads me down a rabbit hole where I’m like, oh, you know what? I do need to create a model that addresses this need for for a different customer segment or something like that. So definitely pay attention to your competition as well so you can gain some good inspiration there.

Josh 00:21:45  I love that kind of mindset shift to be looking at, you know, being inspired by your competition, not just seeing them as like, oh, you know, they’re just my competition. Like you should be seeing like, oh, they did this. Oh, that gives me another idea. Maybe I could tweak and refine that. And I love that you talked about like always coming out with new models or variations for your product.

Josh 00:22:03  I think that that, again, is one of the most important things is to continually stay two steps ahead of the competition, right? Because as soon as you come out with something, guess what that competitor is going to do? Oh, okay. Well, I need to go create something similar to that. And I think that’s the advantage that we have to all of those overseas competitors. I think they do a very poor job of understanding like the end user. And they’re but they’re very good at copying. Right. And so if you can always stay ahead of them in terms of innovation, designs like you will always continue to win because it’s the people that you know, they are who you were, you know, a year ago. And that’s kind of the nature of the platform. I think today is like, you just always have to be growing because if you’re not growing and actively pushing new products like you will fall into kind of like decline mode, in your business. So anything else that you would double down there on that and new product development.

Josh 00:22:51  Yeah. Anything that we haven’t any stones we haven’t overturned here. No I don’t think so.

Kusha 00:22:55  Yeah. I think just with product development try not to make too many assumptions because I made the mistake of making a lot of assumptions, making the product so custom and so radically different than everything else out there. And then you find that, you know, you launch it and you spend a ton of money, and then you find it like nobody really cares that much about, you know, most of those features. And then so it’s frustrating cause you wasted so much time and energy and money making molds and tooling and the inventory and all that, and all you really need to do is maybe just do 1 or 2 of those features rather than all ten of them, and you just have a lot of time and money and reduce your overall costs.

Josh 00:23:23  Great, great insights and great feedback there. I want to go back real quick to what you talked about with your first brand is that you were doing about 50% of your sales on Shopify.

Josh 00:23:32  You were doing some meta ads and Google ads. I’m curious to hear from your perspective, you know, would you ever go back to that model with your current brands now, or do you feel like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze? It’s better to just double down on Amazon right now.

Kusha 00:23:46  No, I definitely think it’s worth testing, especially if you have something differentiated and it’s a little bit more of a blue ocean. Not not super competitive yet. I think it’s worth testing if you have the budget for it. I mean, you can launch Google Ads for fairly cheap and Google, if you think about Google, Google is very much like Amazon, where it’s a query based platform. You know, Amazon and Google are similar to each other. And I think, you know, Amazon built their business on Google, you know, using Google Ads and such in the beginning. So I think Google can be a nice, cheap, you know, easy way to start to expand outside of Amazon and then start to direct traffic to your own store and build your email list, build, you know, build your assets of SMS and email lists that you’re not relying solely on Amazon.

Kusha 00:24:19  So that way, you know, if you’re 100% on Amazon right now. Maybe in six months to a year, maybe you’ll be like, you know, 70% Amazon, 30% Shopify or 5050 or, you know, the more that you can, you know, have control over your own customers that you own. I think the better in the long run. And a lot I think a little bit less stress too, because Amazon just has such a stronghold over your, you know, over your listings and your account and your funds and disbursements and all that. I think it’s better to try to maybe think about Amazon as a good launch pad, especially if you’ve been selling on Amazon for a long time. You know, Amazon. Well, think of it as a good kind of Kickstarter because the traffic’s already there and it’s very cheap to get traffic from Amazon. If you know what you’re doing and you know how to, you know, relevant keywords and such. And then over time, try to build your Shopify store and your, your direct response, outside of Amazon.

Kusha 00:25:02  And I think, you know, TikTok is a little bit trickier. I think I know a lot of people are talking about TikTok right now, but like I said, it does require a lot of creatives. You might need like 2 or 3 dozen creatives, Video creatives like UGC style from from content creators that you could run as ads or run as like spark ads, where it looks like it’s coming from their profile. in order to get something to maybe go viral and become profitable. obviously there’s always exceptions to that, but that seems to be kind of the common theme I see when I talk to a lot of successful, DTC e-commerce sellers. they’re running a lot of creatives and meta, too, but I don’t think nearly as much. You may not need as much. And sometimes with meta you can if you find a winning creative, you can run that winning creative for a long time. But TikTok seems to be that, you know, the I think the fatigue, the creative fatigue happens a lot sooner.

Kusha 00:25:41  So you need to just constantly be refreshing it every week.

Josh 00:25:43  Yeah, I see that as well. I’m curious, like, have you done anything with your different brands to build your email list off of Amazon? Like, have you done any like QR codes on product packaging or anything like that to build an email list off of, you know, launching on Amazon?

Kusha 00:25:56  Yeah, we’ve had different products where there was, you know, maybe inserts for, you know, maybe an extended warranty or maybe there was some, some type of a funnel we’d have in place there to provide product support, things like that. and so honestly, we didn’t really do a ton with that. And, you know, that’s something that we need to do better at is, is, you know, improve our email marketing and improve our, you know, our indoctrination sequences and things like that. But, I think product inserts, Obviously, Amazon doesn’t want you to do that. So you have to be careful about, you know, putting in insert deliberately designed to turn Amazon customers into your customers.

Kusha 00:26:25  So you have to be kind of cognizant about how you do that. But I think it’s fairly safe in my opinion. If you’re going to be offering, you know, a warranty registration, I think it’s fairly reasonable that, you know, if you sell a product that has a warranty that they have registered in some way. I think also, product support is a very safe thing because Amazon wants you to provide product support they want. They love it when sellers help and provide product support. they don’t want you to circumvent their processes and things like that. But you know, when it comes to product support, I don’t think there’s an issue. So if you can get people to go through you to get help or video guides and things like that, you know, at a minimum you could pixel them. So if you just get them to go to your site to see video guides or download certain guides, I probably wouldn’t put those guides behind some type of a opt in wall, because that might frustrate some people that they have to give their email in order to view their, their, you know, guides that came with their product.

Kusha 00:27:08  but I would definitely pixel them so you could put a cookie on there on that page and you can pixel them, run ads to them, and then use some type of funnel ads through Meta or Google or whatever it may be, to get them to, you know, maybe buy another boat or maybe just, you know, whatever it may be. So at a minimum, I’d be definitely using, inserts to, to try to get people pixel in some way.

Josh 00:27:29  Yeah. Love, love that strategy. and using the pixelation to then run other ads to them. So brilliant. What else would you recommend that we haven’t yet touched on? We’ve touched on numerous topics today. What else you know, do you think our audience needs to hear in order to help them scale from 7 to 8 figures?

Kusha 00:27:46  Yeah, I don’t know. I think we kind of touched on everything when it comes to traffic and when it comes to creatives and technology like I, as well as customizations. you know, I think also maybe the other thing is just having a good strategy for sourcing.

Kusha 00:27:58  you know, sourcing is obviously a key component to your success, not only getting quality products, but also, making sure you’re getting it at the best price. So sourcing can be, you know, most people obviously probably sourcing from China. But, you know, don’t be afraid to maybe venture outside of that. Look at other countries to source from as well. That could also be a selling point, because a lot of the competitors that you see on Amazon. They’re either directly selling from China, so it might be a Chinese competitor, or you see a lot of these other US sellers who are selling products made in China. And, you know, a lot of consumers love it when they see it in a different country. I think there’s just more trust there when it’s a product that’s, you know, maybe not necessarily made in China, especially when it’s a product that maybe interacts with the human body, something that you put on the body or something that you consume or put on your face or something like that, those types of products, you know, I think there’s going to be more trust there to that.

Kusha 00:28:42  If it says it’s non-toxic, you’re going to trust it more. If it is made in the USA than made in China. I think there’s just less trust that, you know, this, this company from China who, you know, may have a certificate that says non-toxic. How well can we trust that? Is that validated? Is this a scrupulous not, you know, hard to know for sure, but I think that yeah. Made in the USA if you can. You know definitely. That’s a good way to go. It can be a lot more expensive like maybe five, ten times more expensive. But if you’re in a category where you know you can justify selling at a higher price, it might be worth the added cost of goods sold.

Josh 00:29:08  Yeah, that’s good. Good input and advice. Do you have any recommendations in terms of sourcing like are there partners agencies that you utilize when you need to source a new product?

Kusha 00:29:16  No. You know, we have an employee in China and you know that that Chinese employee like you can start with like a trading company, for instance.

Kusha 00:29:23  Honestly, a lot of the sellers on Alibaba are often trading companies, so they’re not the end factory. So you’re paying in essence a little bit of a markup. Because when you go to this Chinese factory on let’s say Alibaba, if they’re the trading company and not the actual manufacturer, they’re going to be marking it up so that they make a V2. So they’re going to mark up the per unit cost. So a lot of times you can ask them, you know, ask them questions around, you know, how many units they will fit in a large container like a full container. If you ask questions like that, you’ll be able to decipher whether this person is actually a trading company or are they an actual manufacturer because they don’t know an answer to that question, they’re most likely, you know, not the actual manufacturer and most likely the trading company. So it sounds like that can be very probative and and helpful. but yeah, you know, finding a good sourcing agent long term, you know, that would be probably the best way to go, I think, is our sourcing agent was originally a trading company we were working with.

Kusha 00:30:12  And then that individual left that trading company and then kind of work for us directly. But you could probably find one maybe on Upwork, you know, you can find these agents, but, yeah, like I said, that the key is trying to find these manufacturers directly. that would be the best way to go. You know, try to work with these manufacturers directly by asking these questions. That’s where you can get the cheapest price. I’ve heard some some things people were saying that, you know, for instance, with Alibaba, that, a lot of the factories that really need the work, those are the ones that go in Alibaba, the ones who are really high quality, like the best factories, they don’t really list on there because they don’t need it. They don’t need to be listed on Alibaba. They don’t need to find customers or clients from there. and generally, I have found in my experience, like a lot of the factories we work with us in the past, you know, they don’t speak English, so I have to have the agent work with them directly because they can speak Chinese with them.

Kusha 00:30:54  And, you’re not going to see that on Alibaba. These Alibaba representatives are speaking English. And so you’re not going to find those types of factories on there.

Josh 00:31:02  Yeah. Love those insights I think those are some great pointers. when trying to find the right manufacturing partner. coach, this has been a great podcast. 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. So action item number one is create differentiated products. And I think that that’s what Kesha really doubled down on, I think has been the magic to his success in scaling and exiting three different brands is being able to have something that’s completely differentiated in the market. It creates that additional moat around you, and you can tell how much time and effort that Kesha has put into thinking of how. How do I create a product that’s better than existing products that are out there on the market, which then leads into action? Item number two is when you do create innovative, differentiated products, make sure that you have an IP strategy in place.

Josh 00:31:51  So whether that’s obtaining a utility patent which will definitely have more teeth to sink into it, or a design pattern that can be very robust as well. But make sure you understand the implications of, you know, your copyrights, design patterns and utility patterns. And we’ve previously had Rich Goldstein on the podcast who specializes in doing just that and helping provide a strategic insight in terms of, you know, your IP moat that you can create around your business. And then last but not least, I think the third action item is creating those meta and Google ads back to those Amazon customers. So if you can find a way to have somebody scan a QR code for a product warranty or whatever, grab that pixel so that you could then build up that your your pixel list on meta that says, hey, anytime that somebody has this pixel on them, go ahead and run this ad and it’s just like an upsell ad. That’s an easy way to start your Shopify brand without saying like, oh, I’ve got to go figure out a bunch of UGC content.

Josh 00:32:45  How do I go approach a cold audience that will then create a database of customers for yourself? That in turn, you could then create lookalike audiences. And so I really like that, you know, hack of just using that pixel to then be able to get the ball rolling at a small scale. So is there anything else that you feel like I left off as an action item here?

Kusha 00:33:01  No, I think the only other thing would be, you know, integrating more AI into your day to day, utilizing that to become much more efficient and maybe even reducing your overhead like we we had, you know, agencies we were using in the past for a lot of our creatives and copywriting, and now we just rely heavily on AI to speed things up. So it just requires a lot less manpower, which is a lot less overhead.

Josh 00:33:20  Yeah, I agree, I think that that we’ll add that as the fourth action item there. Right. Is implementing AI. So wonderful. Now the final three questions here.

Josh 00:33:29  What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Kusha 00:33:32  I would say probably you know Rich dad, Poor Dad was a really, really good one for me because it really kind of changed the way that I thought my whole life I was, you know, kind of led to believe by my own parents even that, you know, you work really hard, you go to school, you get a job, you get a degree, and then you become successful. And in reality, you know, especially today, like, none of that stuff matters, even with my own kids. Like we homeschool them now and I don’t really care if they go to college. Like it’s not a priority, you know? So you got MrBeast, who, you know, started YouTube when he was like 11 and then 23. He’s got like the biggest YouTube channel in the world. You know, you don’t. Education is something that you know, you had before you started school. And you’ll have after you leave school.

Kusha 00:34:04  And, you know, so I feel like Richard had really opened up my eyes to just how I view things like those systems of education, as well as just understanding it, like the difference between assets and liabilities. And I think those are so important to running a business as well as, you know, when you do see success, you know, becoming a good investor too, because that is really a hard transition when you start making money. I’ve seen people make a lot of money in e-commerce, and as long as they have that cash flow, they’re happy, but they’re blowing it on a ton of stuff. They’re buying expensive cars, they’re renting expensive homes. And then when that cash dries up, they go broke or bankrupt because they never really learned. The skill of becoming a good investor as well. And saving is just part of it. You can’t just, you know, just be a saver. You have to know how to invest. Especially now with inflation being so high, inflation is just going to destroy your savings.

Kusha 00:34:41  So you have to learn at the same time that you’re a good e-commerce entrepreneur, you got to learn to be a good investor.

Josh 00:34:45  Yeah, I think that that point is really well taken. I don’t think that gets talked enough about is like, what do you do with the excess cash flow that comes in? And you’re right, like by assets and not liabilities, right? Don’t just throw your money down the toilet because, you know, hard days will come. And if that ever dries up, which it will at some point, like you better have a plan And you know, investing wisely can make all the difference. So. Great recommendation. second question here is what’s your favorite AI tool and how are you using it?

Kusha 00:35:12  Well, I think our biggest AI tool we’re using right now is our own software chasm. That is AI assisted for PPC. And so a lot of the stuff, like I mentioned earlier that we were doing manually before, like taking certain keywords and putting them as negative exact matches or taking certain customer search terms and launching a variety of manual campaigns targeting those winning search terms.

Kusha 00:35:30  a lot of the stuff that we had to do manually that was very monotonous and time consuming and slow and inefficient. Now we’re using Kazam to do it in an automated fashion. So Kazam is now taking everything that was basically in my head and what I was doing manually with, optimization. And then it’s adding on a layer of AI to make it even better, to automate the whole process. And the cool thing we’ve added now is we’ve added this ability where you can chat with the AI. So there’s an actual chat feature now in the dashboard where you can actually speak to the AI as if it’s like your own media buyer. So instead of paying thousands of dollars a month, maybe a media buyer to manage your Amazon PPC, now you can pay as little as a couple hundred dollars a month and have this. Am I where you say, hey, you know, can you tell me, you know, give me an overview of how the campaigns for this performing. Can you pause these campaigns? Can you change these budgets? Can you add these keywords? You have keyword recommendations.

Kusha 00:36:14  There’s a variety of things that it can do. It can do like several dozen things they can do for you. So it’s a very, very versatile and robust tool. And I think for the cost, it’s a no brainer in my opinion.

Josh 00:36:23  Yeah, it sounds like a fantastic tool. We recommend people go check out. All right. Third and final question here. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why? Yeah, I would.

Kusha 00:36:33  Say a friend and acquaintance of mine I got this guy’s name is Josh. She’s the founder of Snow Whitening. And, you know, I knew him more as I can wait in several years ago, but a business partner of mine in another brand that I. That we own together, he kind of knew him a little bit better. And so we ended up doing a call with him just to kind of review this new brand that we acquired about a year ago. And, it was just very, very generous with his time.

Kusha 00:36:54  I mean, he we spent like, three hours, on zoom, and you just dived into everything. This guy, you know, you don’t know much about him. He’s still, you know, like snow, I think is over $100 million a year business. That’s just one of several, I think, successful businesses. It is. So it’s just the guy’s a serial entrepreneur and he’s just very, very, you know, attuned to, you know, how to drive, successful DTC. Amazon, I’m not sure. We didn’t really talk too much about Amazon with him. It was mostly B2C. So I don’t know his his background with that, but, with DTC advertising and, Shopify, it was it was very, very insightful. Like I said, we spent like three hours and it was like nonstop. I mean, he barely, took a minute to breathe. He was talking like the whole time and provided, like just a million bits of value was so good. So definitely I recommend someone I think everyone should listen to and follow because he provides a lot of good information.

Josh 00:37:37  Yeah, he does have a great track record. So great recommendation because if people want to follow you, they want to learn more about your AI, PPC tool. Where’s the best way people can follow you and learn more?

Kusha 00:37:46  Yeah, go to go chasm.com. That’s geo chasm.com. And you know they can always email me directly if you have questions info. Com I’m happy to help with anything.

Josh 00:37:56  Awesome. Well thank you so much for joining the podcast today. It was fun having you on the show.