Episode 45 – Helium 10 CTO Bojan Gajic Talks Tech — Latest Amazon FBA Updates & Insights

In this week’s episode of Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Sutton talks tech with Bojan Gajic, Helium 10’s CTO. Listen in as Bojan explains the science behind sales estimation and the difference between data precision and accuracy. Also, find out how a mysterious company boosted sales on Amazon by $200,000,000

In episode 45 of the Serious Sellers Podcast Bradley and Bojan discuss:

• 01:40 – Bojan’s Origin Story
• 02:20 – The Many Parallels Between IOS (Apple) and Amazon
• 03:15 – Using Rank to Determine Estimated Sales
• 06:40 – Balancing the Multiple Components of Accuracy
• 07:25 – Amazon’s BSR (Best Sellers Rank) and Private/Not-Private Calculations
• 08:10 – In Building Models, Short Periods are Inefficient 
• 08:30 – Helium 10 – Precision and Accuracy
• 09:13 – What’s the Difference?
• 11:30 – Helium 10 10X’s Itself 
• 13:20 – Accuracy and Privacy
• 14:50 – Sales Estimation and the 405 Freeway
• 16:53 – Quality Not Volume and Calculate then Validate
• 21:00 – Bojan’s Report from Sellercon
• 26:50 – Amazon Sellers’ Needs are Always Changing 
• 28:00 – How to Reach Out to Bojan with Your Actual Problems to Solve 
• 33:12 – Mystery Company Triples Income on Amazon to $300,000,000 with Helium 10 
• 35:30 – Reach Out to Bradley with Tech Talk Suggestions

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today we have our CTO (chief technology officer) on for TechTalk with Bojan, and we will be going over some new updates that make Xray estimations even more accurate than before. We’re going to talk about why we don’t need to use our customers’ data to be so accurate, and he even spills the beans on some new features we have coming up.

Bradley Sutton: How’s it going, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton, and we’ve got our third installment now of TechTalk with Bojan. Bojan, for those of you who don’t know, is our CTO here at Helium 10. It’s funny, you know Bojan always told me, “I don’t think anybody listens to my episodes, but we were at our social in Vegas and actually I brought a couple of people up to you just to prove to you—because they told me that one of their favorite parts of the Serious Sellers Podcast is your episode. So Bojan, you’ve got a lot of fans out there and let’s not keep your fans waiting. Let’s get right into it. First of all, how’s it going, Bojan? And how was your weekend?

Bojan Gajic: Good, thank you. That was pretty good. I rode my bicycle with family and did some fun stuff. Spent a lot of time out in the sun and got some sunburns. I’m back in the office now.

Bradley Sutton: It’s Monday. Did you watch the debacle of the USA Gold Cup final?

Bojan Gajic: Losing one zero is not really a debacle. What do you expect?

Bradley Sutton: But to a Mexican team that was so weak. They were missing so many key players, and they couldn’t even score a goal. Anyways, we’re not here for soccer talk with Bojan and we’re here for TechTalk. I did a recent episode with Matt Clark from Amazing, and we talked about his origin story—something that I don’t know much about, but you and Manny actually go way back before the Helium 10 years. I’m just curious, I’m sure some of your fans out there are too. We learned in earlier episodes that you are trained as a mathematician, but obviously, you’ve been a developer before Helium 10, so what was your and Manny’s origin story before Helium 10? I know you and Manny worked together on some projects before.

Bojan Gajic: Manny and I transitioned through several phases in several aspects of business and software business in particular. So, we went from software platform, like server-based software platform, to Windows desktop clients to Bios apps, iPhone apps, and now Amazon. The last transition was the most interesting. What’s known and part of the story that’s really out there is how Manny transitioned from IOS to Amazon to realizing how similar iPhone app listing is to Amazon product listing. Another thing that the Amazon and Apple share is the bestseller rank. On Amazon, part of the success of a product is exposed and measured through their bestseller chart and bestseller rank. iTunes has a similar chart where they list top 200, top 500 sellers, and top-performing apps. Before breaking with Amazon, Manny and I again worked on the iPhone apps and part of that process was essentially doing analysis, reverse engineering ranks for specific categories in iTunes.

Bradley Sutton: You would estimate how many downloads they were in or how many users they had based on what their rank was?

Bojan Gajic: Correct. So, you would look at apps in specific categories that they were interested in and then based on data that we have—data that’s available at the time—we would estimate how many sales or how many downloads if it’s free app, the app has, and then, we will build our marketing strategy, their development strategy, our budget based on those estimates. So, it’s kind of similar to what you do with Amazon. Then with the Xray as a seller, you might use Xray or Black Box to analyze specific categories and to gauge the cost of engaging and releasing your product in a specific niche. So, that’s kind of another parallel that I see between Apple and Amazon. And that’s a project that Manny and I took not really together—just at the same time, but we took separate paths to come to the same place: Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. But one time you were working together with Manny on these apps?

Bojan Gajic: Yes.

Bradley Sutton: Was that when you were in San Marcos or you had an office? For those who don’t know, I actually live in San Marcos, but most people haven’t heard of that. There’s a San Marcos in Texas where they have an Amazon fulfillment center; that’s not the San Marcos I live in. I live in San Marcos, California. It’s in San Diego. But you and Manny actually had an office right near where my house was.

Bojan Gajic: Yes, just a couple of miles down the road from you.

Bradley Sutton: Wow.

Bojan Gajic: Too bad that we’re up in Irvine right now. I wish we were still down in that office.

Bradley Sutton: We need to reopen that office. Yeah. I have an hour drive each way to work and Bojan has about an hour and a half. So anyways, you had just talked about Xray, so that made me think of the last time we were on here we were talking about sales estimations and how sometimes there’s this hysteria and then people are still obsessed with accuracy. Hey, accuracy is important, but what they forget about is the reason why we need estimations in the first place for sales. We’re examining niches and we want to see if something’s viable or not.

Bradley Sutton: Let’s say somebody has 2000 sales a month, somebody has 1400 sales a month. At the end of the day, those two numbers are not going to change your decision. We’re talking about the difference between—what’s 2000 divided by 30 Mr. Mathematician?

Bojan Gajic: Like 66.6.

Bradley Sutton: Oh my God. Like 66.6, and then we’re talking 1400 sales—a 50 or 45 or something like that. As far as I go, that’s not going to change my decision-making process. That means “Hey, that’s either a great selling product.” It’s not like “I’m going to not sell something because I discovered a product that’s selling 1400 instead of 2000 or vice versa.” But that being said, like I just mentioned, accuracy is something that is important to customers out there.

Bradley Sutton: I know we’re constantly trying to make sure that we are giving accurate estimations, and I believe the development team just rolled something out recently. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Bojan Gajic: Yeah. So, let’s go back to that 1400 variable reporting versus 2000, I kind of agree with that. So, 10, 15, 20 percent difference should not make or break your product. When you’re doing your research, when you’re analyzing competition, and when you are analyzing new opportunities, there are multiple components and the order of magnitude—you do want to know if you need a thousand products or 10,000 products. The difference between 15 and 2000 in potentially two or three weeks—extra units, extra storage costs. So, that’s not as significant as it might seem if you focus on numbers alone, but we do want to provide as accurate and as precise estimation as we can to kind of increase the level of confidence.

Bojan Gajic: Now Amazon is pretty good at putting out a data point that’s very useful for estimating sales. So, BSR, best seller rank, essentially tells us who is selling more versus who is selling less. There are some things and the formula, the way they do it, it’s not public, but the general principles are actually public. If you know where to look, you can see they described how BSR is calculated in pretty fine detail. It’s essentially the trailing of sales over certain periods of time. How the decay of sales two days ago affects your BSR of the sales you made an hour ago and they calculate it hourly. So, that’s all well-known. There are some things that when we’re building our models, we try not to focus on very short periods. What can happen, especially if you’re evaluating models, you could miss the forest behind the tree.

Bojan Gajic: If you focus on reducing daily or hourly error, you could be making a consistent era in one direction. So, let’s say you’re estimating every day, and you overestimate by 5%. At the end of the month, when you look at that long term, let’s say a 30-day period, you have 5% error. Now on the flip side, you could be making a larger daily error like absolute error, but it might go both ways. So one day you overestimate 3%, the next day you underestimate 5% so, on the average, if you just look at absolutes, it might seem like a bigger error, but when you aggregate over 30 days, your actual error is usually smaller than day-by-day average. We try to find the balance between being precise and being accurate. Do you know the difference of precision and accuracy?

Bradley Sutton: No, not really.

Bojan Gajic: Let me try. So, if you ask me to guess your age if I say you’re 27 years, two months, and five days old.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. I’d be very happy if that was.

Bojan Gajic: I would be very precise because I went down to years and then months and days. So, that’s very precise. Unfortunately, for you, it’s very inaccurate.

Bradley Sutton: Indeed.

Bojan Gajic: Now, if I say, “Oh you’re between 30 and 50 years old,” I am accurate but not really precise—like it doesn’t really tell our audience much. So, we want to find a balance between precise and being accurate and then do that in a way that can be consumed. If I give a very precise number of sales at that monthly level, but it’s not accurate like if I miss by 50%, I didn’t do much.

Bojan Gajic: Then, if on the other side, if I give you a range, “Hey sales for the month are between 1000 and 10,000.” Sure, I might be very accurate, but sales are between zero and 1 million. They’re like a hundred percent accuracy every time. But it’s not precise enough. So, we try to balance multiple things and with that in mind, we consistently are looking at our model, evaluating our model on a daily basis. There is an automated process happening every day. What we did a few months ago, we expanded the team; we brought in some new talent, and we also find some opportunities in the schedule to unleash the new talent. So, we looked at the current model; we looked at what’s out there in terms of competition, and then, we also looked at what’s out there in terms of data that’s available.

Bojan Gajic: We spent a few months and the team came back with really impressive results. It’s something that I can share in broad terms, but where we used to be comparable to our competitors. Now, our order of magnitude, our precision, and our accuracy are, let’s say, 10 times better than what it used to be. Now, if monthly sales are a thousand and your estimate previous estimate was 1100, so you’re off by 10%, and then you bring it down to 1010, so the error changes from 10% to 1%. It’s spectacular. It’s a huge improvement, but in terms of efficiency, well, in terms of value for the customer, it might not mean as much because we again go back to how important it really is to have a very precise and accurate estimate. So, what we have now is way better than what we had before, but what we had before was sufficient and better than what’s really required to make informed decisions. It’s kind of like the Gillette.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I don’t know if you ever saw that AMA, but I did a live AMA where it was really difficult to do because I had to hide some customers’ information since I was doing it live. But I VPNnd into four or five different accounts. I just took a lot of their top sellers. People didn’t know I was preparing this. It was completely live video, and I think this was before we actually did these algorithm changes. You know, we weren’t exact, but there was literally not one out of the 10 examples of random products I picked where there would have been any decision-making difference. There was one that was 20% off and somebody, a competitor might say, “Oh my goodness, 20% off. That’s life and death.”

Bradley Sutton: But like what we talked about at the beginning of the episode, at the end of the day, that doesn’t matter. But you’re saying even after that, now we’re even more accurate and more precise than even when I made that video.

Bojan Gajic: Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.

Bradley Sutton: That’s cool. Now, one thing. Speaking of that video, after that video or actually after our previous podcasts, we talked about a common misconception that people have, like, “Oh, Helium 10 is trying to use all of the customers. They’re hacking into my sales numbers in order to become accurate.” And we had cleared that confusion up. We had said, “No, we just have a very small group of friends and families—accounts that are giving us information, allowing us to validate it.” And something that I got a lot, I’m not sure if you get this too, is that people say, “No, no, no, that’s impossible. How in the world can you build an accurate model by just having a few friends and families accounts? You’ve got to have thousands of accounts and thousands of data points in order to estimate accurate numbers.” What do you say to people who bring that up?

Bojan Gajic: It’s a valid concern. I support our customers and people, in general, being aware of the risks of sharing too much information. An MWS token that the sellers share with us and some other tools that are really valuable resources. There’s a lot of information that’s made available when the token is shared. So, it’s a valid concern, and the sellers should be diligent and make sure that they share tokens with tools that they really need, and they really use. They should go back to seller central and disable tokens or pull back tokens from tools that they no longer use. Now that being said, let’s look through the window. If you look through the window in front of you, we’re here on the 405 freeway. There are about 1 million vehicles a day, coming our way or just in front of us every day. If you ask me to estimate the average speed, for vehicles on this freeway throughout the day, how many vehicles do you really need to measure? If you are a cop, a highway patrol, with a radar gun, how many data points, how many vehicles do you want to look at to build a really reliable estimation of what average speed throughout the day is? You might look at a vehicle in the fast lane, you might look at one in the slow lane, you might do that every 15-20 minutes. But in general, out of those 1 million vehicles that we have driving next to us, you might need 50 to a hundred vehicles, and it has to be distributed throughout the day.

Bojan Gajic: If you look at 100,000 vehicles at 3:00 PM or even worse, 50,000 vehicles at 6:00 PM, you might build an incorrect model. So, you might deduce that the average speed here is averaging 25 miles an hour at best. If you look at midnight, you might look at 1000 vehicles that are speeding at 95 miles an hour, and you will say, “Oh, the average speed here is 95 miles per hour. The key is not the number of vehicles that you look at, and similarly, for a sales estimation, the key is not the number of products. The key is the proper distribution of those products or proper distribution of the attributes of the vehicles here on the freeway. Now occasionally, you might have somebody, who at midnight, is driving 25 miles an hour.

Bojan Gajic: Those would be those outliers that you need to identify. There’s some work that’s happening there, but in general, what I need and what the team needs is not the volume; it’s the quality. And to isolate the quality, we spend a lot of time. You can go online, and you can find a lot of opinions on how to build a model and how to run sales estimation; a lot of those comments just don’t have the experience that we do. There are things that have to happen at scale, and it has to be cost efficient. So, if I build a model that takes seven days to calculate, to make all the calculation, then pick the best model, and I have to do it daily, obviously that’s not really realistic or scalable because I’m lagging. Every day I lose six days.

Bojan Gajic: If I build a model that’s awesome and great, but it costs $5 to run one estimation, then I have to do that for hundreds of millions of products in multiple marketplaces, that’s also not realistic.  There are things that can be done that just make no sense. Yes, sure. We could do that, but it’s not cost-effective and it’s not realistic to happen. So we’re also looking at that sanitation part; we are looking at scalability; we are looking at making that data available, so the critical part in building that pipeline going from Amazon BSR to a number of sales is not really at the volume of products and the number of sales that those products are generating. There are other components in that pipeline that are much harder to solve.  If you just look at sales, if I have a customer and the customer makes a hundred sales, I would need to know if they’re the only seller throughout the day. Are there any variations throughout the day? There are multiple things that are happening that make the actual number of sales for a specific customer pretty irrelevant. Now, going back to that previous analogy, if you establish your model if you understand what the traffic pattern is on Monday and Tuesday, and you do know that the pattern will be the same or similar on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. So, once you have a working model, you don’t really need to spend that much energy and that much effort, and you don’t need that many vehicles. You know, just occasionally, you pull over somebody and you write a ticket and you say, “Oh you were driving 85 miles an hour.”

Bojan Gajic: So same thing here. We just need those friends and family to validate our model. We don’t really need to build our model based on that.

Bradley Sutton: For health and wellness or whatever the category, health and household; there are hundreds of thousands of products in there. To be able to build an accurate estimation of sales, we don’t need 20,000 of those products to know their exact sales in order to build it. Actually, if we had 20,000, that doesn’t even guarantee accuracy because like you said, maybe those 20,000 are all on the low end of the scale or were all doing lightning deals or something that could actually work to a disadvantage and skew our numbers. But the point is that with just a few  friends and family who have a high quality of a data point, something that’s not a lightning deal, somebody that’s not sharing Buy Box, something that’s a good representative of what performing product would be, that is more than enough in order to build an accurate estimation.

Bojan Gajic: To validate our estimation. How we actually isolate the product that we want to look at and how do we initially calculate.  We are not estimating their sales. We’re calculating sales for certain products. I wish I could share that, but maybe some other time.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. All right. Now, let’s just take a couple of minute break here; some of this numbers talk is hurting my head and might be hurting other people’s head too.  We just got back from SellerCon, and a lot of times, you’re locked up here in the office for 12, 14 hours a day as your wife is very upset about sometimes.  And you got to get out of the office, go to SellerCon, talk to other tool companies, talk to Helium 10 users, and listen to some talks. Is there anything that you’d like to share about that? Something interesting that users talked about or maybe other tool companies were talking about?

Bojan Gajic: Yeah, my wife was really happy that instead of going to my dungeon, I’m going to Vegas. That was so exciting.

Bradley Sutton: But, hey, you brought her along, didn’t you?

Bojan Gajic: She followed me with the kids.

Bradley Sutton: She followed you. So, you’ve got the family.

Bojan Gajic: Yeah. Next time you’ll do it without kids. So, we can do adult stuff.

Bradley Sutton: There we go. I don’t need to know about the family conversations, but what about the conversations with our Helium 10 family or others?

Bojan Gajic: I see that the family’s growing, and that’s potentially and possibly the most pleasant aspect of my job—going out and interacting with the customers and then getting feedback, especially now when feedback is mostly positive. I remember the days when there were a lot of complaints about the performance or lacking certain aspects in some of our tools. Now the feedback is turning more positive. It’s a pretty pleasant experience, a very positive sentiment. But what’s interesting is that the number of personas that you’re interacting with, number of types of customers that are really using Helium 10, is expanding. The work is never done. While we started as a set of tools focused on private label sellers; now there are other types of sellers selling on Amazon that are using Helium 10 tools, finding value and asking for tweaks and improvements. There are always a lot of ideas for new things; a lot of ideas for improvements to the existing products. So that’s very exciting. I see a lot of potential for us, but they also see a lot of demand for help.

Bradley Sutton: Were there things that people, of course whenever anybody finds out, “Hey this is the CTO of Helium 10,” obviously they’re going to give you suggestions about, “Ooh, I’d love to have this tool or I love to have this feature,” but without saying what it is. Was there anything you heard over that weekend that actually now is on your roadmap that “Ooh, that’s a good idea. Let’s maybe dedicate some time to do this.”

Bojan Gajic: Almost everything that I received as feedback is in the roadmap one way or another. There are very few comments that I’ve heard that I could just discard—like some things that can be tweaked, improved. For example, for alerts, we had Mark, a customer who asked to essentially build case management into alerts. When he and his team are receiving the notifications or alerts, some of those notifications are actionable, like immediately actionable. So we can do certain things. If it’s a negative review, maybe they want to escalate to Amazon or leave a comment, reply to negative review immediately. If they get notified that there is a change in measurements—that the product in Amazon has been measured, and they change the dimensions. They have to open a case for Amazon and then wait a few days, get the response back. So, somebody needs to track those actions and what the outcome of the action is. So, this customer, in particular, asked if we could expand our alerts to build the case management, which is a great idea.

Bojan Gajic: Unfortunately, I don’t think we can do that, but what we are looking into right now—

Bradley Sutton: Case management? Like actually open a case on Amazon and seller support? Is that what he was looking for?

Bojan Gajic: And track the progress. So essentially they’re using spreadsheets right now so, they’ll make a comment that the product such and such requires this kind of action, and this is what happened with it and somebody contacted Amazon and seven days later, they’ll go back to that excel spreadsheet, and they’ll look at open cases and pull up if they need to pull up. In that sense, I wish we could do something like that for Helium 10, but I don’t think we can do the best job. But there are tools out there that we’re already using, like when we’re doing project management or when we’re doing task management, we are already using tools that allow for something like this.

Bojan Gajic: You can make a comment, you can attach an image, you can follow up, you can have alerts. What we’re working on right now is the building of integrated pipeline where you can take those alerts from Helium 10 and then propagate those through to third-party tool. Maybe you can create integration through Zapier, Parabola, or IFTTT (If This Then That). So maybe you can integrate the alerts with some of those tools and create cases in JIRA, for example. You might be using Jira to monitor those thoughts. So, that’s one thing that was really out of the left field. How do you say that in baseball?

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, I don’t remember that being requested.

Bojan Gajic: But it makes sense, and it especially makes sense if you’re trying to service agencies or bigger brands where they don’t have the capacity to monitor every product and every task.

Bojan Gajic: There are many things that have to happen. They’ll initiate an action, and they have to go back and visit the pipeline to see what needs to be done and what they can do to clear that backlog. As I mentioned, with different personas, you have needs that are different from what we had a year or two ago. The fun thing is that sometimes it can be frustrating, but it is actually fun. It’s encouraging that whatever we put out there, there are needs and there’s demand for more. The work is never done.

Bradley Sutton: We rely on our customers because you’re not selling on Amazon. Manny doesn’t sell on Amazon anymore. I’ve never had my own private label product in my entire life. The only way that we can get the pulse of the market is at these events and our customers. So, obviously, you don’t get out of your dungeon that often for events like this. What I do is I tell people, “Hey—and you let me know if this is still the best way—anybody who does not have the opportunity to talk to Bojan directly at a conference…” What is the best way that they can get their voice heard? In my opinion, it’s not Facebook because I still haven’t figured out that algorithm about how somehow, at the very top of my news feed, I’ll see something from last week. But then something that was just posted is buried, so Facebook things aren’t lost, but what I’ve been telling people is, “Hey, send to support@helium10.com, and don’t just say, “Hey, I’d love to see this,” but detail how they would like it to work. Do you see all of these emails? What’s the best way, in other words, for people to give their ideas?

Bojan Gajic: Right. So support@helium10.com is the best endpoint. If you post on Facebook, somebody might see that, and then it might be escalated, but there’s no set escalation process or phase for our groups. Where we do have the kind of detailed and elaborate escalation process is if you email support@helium10.com. The most valuable for me is the actual problem—description of a problem—that customers are trying to solve. The technology part, I can solve. I understand what we have and what we can do. What I sometimes need help with is understanding the problems that customers are trying to solve.

Bradley Sutton: They don’t need to explain how the tool needs to work. Don’t have them trying to do your job for you, but how can we help them do their job?

Bojan Gajic: Correct. So, that’s the value of having that direct interaction. The same thing happens when I do go out and get a chance to talk to customers. They’ll try to explain the technical aspect of all our tools. And they’re really smart customers and that’s valuable, but it would take a lot of time for them to get familiar with the technology—what we have, what we can do—before they can do that part.

Bojan Gajic: What they can do is tell me the actual problems that they were trying to solve. Maybe they’re spending too much time doing certain things. “This is how I’m using Helium 10, and this is really bugging me. I don’t achieve certain things unless I do this or that” or “Here’s the part in my workflow that that’s not covered by the tool right now. I have to manually—as I said for Mark who mentioned that that process of manually capturing cases in Excel. That’s the problem that I needed to know. That’s what I wanted to hear. You mentioned selling on Amazon, you’re right. I don’t sell on Amazon, and I spoke with Patrick over at SellerCon—one of our customers who came from Switzerland. He did ask, “Hey, do you sell on Amazon?” And when I said “no,” he’s like, “Why don’t you sell on Amazon?” Our customers are Amazon sellers so it might sound off-putting, but I don’t really enjoy that part—actually selling on Amazon. There’s this too much stuff that has to happen there from sourcing to accounting. There are too many things happening and then you have to delegate that. You have to manage that. I just don’t find that very enjoyable. What I do like is problem-solving. I do like to hear about the problems that people are having on that journey. I try to solve that problem and move on and find the next problem to solve essentially. So, yes please, if you’re using Helium 10 software or if you’re not using Helium 10 software but you’re struggling with some aspect of your business-related at Amazon, email support@helium10.com and that will get to me and the engineering team and we have a product management team. People who need to know about that will be alerted and will pay attention to that.

Bradley Sutton: Cool. I want to get back to one last thing about SellerCon in a second here, but you mentioned that we might be integrating something for Mark. So, he suggested something. Now, usually we don’t give everybody a heads up on what we’re working on, but I believe next week or the week after, one of our tools is going to get a makeover, an extreme makeover, and become more functional. Are we allowed to mention that, that tool here, since it’s going to happen soon by the time this episode airs or do you want to keep that secret?

Bojan Gajic: No, we cannot talk about that.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. We can’t talk about that.

Bojan Gajic: So, I assume you’re talking about—I’m like fishing here. Are we talking about Refund Genie?

Bradley Sutton: Yes. Okay. I guess we can, okay.

Bojan Gajic: Yeah, because we have a few tools with a few tweaks and those that are supposed to come out over the next few months. I just wasn’t sure. Yeah, Refund Genie is one of the oldest tools in the Helium 10 Suite, and it’s functional.  At the social I had somebody share a success story where they got over $10,000 on Refund Genie. So probably the first time they run it. It won’t happen every month, but that pays for Helium 10 for 10 years for them. I’m so glad they succeeded. I’m not so happy that we don’t get to share in their success more than just that fee. (laughing….)

Bradley Sutton: Yeah, 5% of that goes to Bojan; 3% to me. No, you guys keep 100% of that, so that’s cool. That’s something that we can look forward to. Now the other thing from SellerCon that was so big for me, I know you’ve got a kick out of it too. I don’t think we’re allowed to say the name of the company yet, but we found out that one of the biggest, most well-known companies in the world is using Helium 10 and, and it was cool because they had mentioned that before—since they’re such a big brand name—they could not even know what they’re doing and they could do something on Amazon. They were actually doing nine figures on Amazon even before they start using Helium 10. I believe it was around a hundred million, but then, they started using Helium 10 and within, I forgot what it was, a year and a half or two years, do you remember what their annual sales went to thanks to Helium 10?

Bojan Gajic: It had tripled. The sales have tripled to 300 million.

Bradley Sutton: Over three. Yeah, that’s crazy. $300 million, and man, talk about percentage. It would have been nice to actually have gone in there when they were first started. We didn’t even know they were using us. “Hey, you know, we’d love to get a maybe 1% of your pay or increase.” That would have been nice. Right?

Bojan Gajic: Yeah. When I had that conversation, I already had a glass of wine. So that’s all it takes for me to say whatever I mean. Did I tell you I spent more on their product in two years than what they paid in Helium 10 fees for that period? There’s that financial aspect, but there’s also bragging rights, so at some point, that may have more value. So, I’m a hero for my kids now.

Bradley Sutton: Did you tell them that?

Bojan Gajic: Yeah, I told them. Well, let’s not the discuss details, but now, I have that satisfaction that my kids actually like what I do. Now they can go out and share it with their friends.

Bradley Sutton: As Manny would say, “How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think” Anyways, Bojan, it’s always a pleasure to have you here. Before we close this episode, is there any other words of wisdom that you have out there or anything else you wanted to talk about?

Bojan Gajic: No, not really. This is it for this time, but I’ll be back in a couple of months. I’ll find a way to skip the next month, so I’ll evade, but the next time I’m back, we will have a different topic. It will be more interesting than this one.

Bradley Sutton: Well, this one was pretty interesting. This is going to be hard to top. So, all right guys. And remember if you have questions for Bojan that you want us to discuss here on Tech Talk with Bojan, please reach out to me. You can find me on Facebook, or you can email support and just say “Attention Serious Sellers Podcast,” and we’ll be happy to address that if we are able to. Thank you, Bojan for joining us, and we will see you next time.