Episode 36 – Top Amazon Private Label Seller Brandon Young, Drops Ninja Knowledge Bombs

Brandon Young, one of the top Amazon Private Label Sellers began selling in 2015. Now, four years and 7 figures later, he’s here to speak with Helium 10’s Director of Training and Customer Success, Bradley Sutton about his ninja tips for everything from Amazon product research and PPC, to a great Amazon launch strategy.

In episode 36 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Brandon discuss:

• 00:00 – An Introduction to Brandon
• 00:50 – Brandon Tries (And Fails) to Give Away a Tesla
• 02:05 – Brandon’s Start on E-Commerce and Amazon
• 04:55 – First Products and Low Hanging Fruit
• 08:15 – What is Brandon’s Process?
• 09:38 – How to Avoid the Wrong Products
• 12:05 – Indicators that Make a Product Stand Out
• 14:30 – Brandon’s Story – Failures Equal Breakthroughs
• 15:50 – Swings and Misses and Brandon’s Rough First 18 Months
• 18:40 – Understanding When to Cut a Product Loose
• 19:30 – Launch Strategy – PPC is not Enough
• 22:55 – PPC and Playing Defense
• 25:00 – Relaunching a Mature Product
• 27:42 – Taking Advantage of the Honeymoon Period
• 29:42 – Last Words of Wisdom from Brandon
• 32:00 – Here’s how to get in touch with Brandon

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.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• 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: Seven-figure seller Brandon Young is going to drop some knowledge bombs on us today with Ninja strategy tips—everything from PPC to product research, keyword research, launch strategy and more.

Bradley Sutton: How’s it going, everybody. Welcome to The Serious Sellers podcast. I am your host Bradley Sutton and awesome to have with us today Brandon Young—seven-figure seller, almost eight figures. Probably maybe by the time you’re reading this, he’s going to be an eight-figure seller or by the time you’re reading this—I hope you’re not reading a podcast. Hope by the time you listen to or are hearing this, he could be very well eight-figure seller. Brandon, how’s it going?

Brandon Young: Great man. Great to be on.

Bradley Sutton: Now, real quick, Brandon, we were just talking right before here. You almost gave away a Tesla yesterday.

Brandon Young: Yeah.

Bradley Sutton: How did that happen? Like how in the world does somebody give away a Tesla?

Brandon Young: Well, I tried my best, so we just bought our second Tesla, and I had to get rid of the first one. So, I decided I didn’t want to just trade it in or do something boring. I decided that I wanted to incentivize people to take that next step and learn the private label. To us, it’s still the best opportunity out there. And I knew a lot of people were on the fence. A lot of people still hate their jobs. So I said, “you know what, I’m just going to give it away to someone that takes my masterclass,” and it’s a class that I teach once a month, once every other month or so—$200, four hours. And I’d just dive deep into all of our processes. Right? The problem was at the end of the class last night, I gave someone the option of either getting the car or taking $14,000 cash, a seat in my mastermind, and 10 hours personally with me coaching, and they took the alternative prize instead of the car. So now I still have the car.

Bradley Sutton: I’ll take it. Yeah, I love electric cars, but guys, this is like hashtag goals. I want to be in a position where I’m just like, “you know what, let me give away a Tesla.” So that brings me to what we’re going to talk about a little bit. I just like to know how you got to this point where your straight giving out Teslas like Oprah Winfrey on her show. So how did you start on Amazon? Or how did you start in e-commerce? Take us back a few years. Where does your journey begin?

Brandon Young: Yeah, it’s been a really fun one, man. Four years ago we got into Amazon; my wife and I, we were dating at the time. And we decided that it was a really good opportunity. We had seen some friends do well, but they were doing arbitrage, and we didn’t want to do an arbitrage model. We wanted something a little bit more scalable; something that we could eventually exit or try to build a sellable business out of. So we looked at wholesale, and we started doing some wholesale; we started doing some liquidation even, and we just ran into all sorts of problems where Amazon was shutting down SKUs that we weren’t allowed to sell and they were restricting brands, and we saw the writing on the wall and the direction they were going. And so I looked at her and she happens to be from China, and I said, “we’re so stupid. Why are we not doing private label? We have a huge advantage. We should be over in China sourcing and doing private label.” So we jumped on a plane three years ago this month. We started our private label journey. We went to Canton fair, and we came back, and without knowing much of what we were doing, we launched a few products.

 Bradley Sutton: Now what kind of advantage was it when you went to that fair with one of you actually speaking Chinese? Did that help in the negotiations or pricing? Do you think that helped? Do you suggest that people—I’m not saying do you suggest that people marry someone who speaks Chinese—at least have a translator or something with them when they go to conferences or shows like this?

Brandon Young: Well, I highly recommend that you marry someone that is Chinese.

Bradley Sutton: So, okay. So he does recommend it.

Brandon Young: Obviously. So, the funny thing is it is somewhat of an advantage. I think the biggest thing for us on the supply chain and what we realized is that some Chinese factories are discriminatory against Chinese buyers over here because unless you present yourself as maybe a broker, they think you might be a spy from another factory, and we’ve run into that.  There are ups and downs. Ultimately, we figured out a way where you don’t necessarily need to speak the language. There are websites out there that are all in Chinese that we use like 1688, for example. But you can use a translate app like the Google translate plugin for chrome, for example. And you’re able to source the same way a Chinese broker would source by being here in America without even speaking the language a lot of times, and with WeChat app, you can translate as well. So, I mean, the advantage has been great. I mean, it really helped us move in this direction, but I wouldn’t say that it’s detrimental not to have someone.

Bradley Sutton: All right. Now your first product that you started selling, I think we’re talking about three years ago. Are you still selling that product today?

Brandon Young: No. No.

Bradley Sutton: So, tell us what it was.

Brandon Young: Yeah. We did a Bluetooth speaker, a waterproof Bluetooth speaker.  That was one of our first products. We jumped into wireless accessories. So obviously, I don’t recommend anyone do wireless accessories. We found out pretty quickly that it’s extremely saturated. The one area in China where the sellers are really well schooled and pretty good at Amazon is Shenzhen—and that’s like the Silicon Valley of China. And so we realized that we probably shouldn’t be doing anything that’s being really made in Shenzhen. And so we’ve gone after a lot of low hanging fruit since then. And we really started developing a process where we knew what to go after, what not to go after based on who’s already selling it.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. Well, let’s dive out. Let’s take a pause in your journey really quick because I do want to talk a little bit about sourcing products. What are some tips, some tricks, some high-level information that you can give our listeners on what are some best practices when they are sourcing your product? I’m sure of course it does help if you actually go in person as you did, but a lot of people don’t have that ability to go overseas and actually visit the factories or visit the Canton fair. What kind of tips can, in general, you give everybody who is maybe looking for their very first product to sell on Amazon?

Brandon Young: Yeah. I think the one thing that people talk about low hanging fruit with regard to sourcing as everyone knows is Alibaba, and so what you need to understand about Alibaba is that Alibaba is in English, because it’s meant to be somewhere where they target American buyers. And so over 95% I would say are going to be brokers when you look for products there. Now the 1688 site that I mentioned earlier is gold because it’s owned by Alibaba. It’s all in Chinese, but it’s where the factories and the large distributors will list their products in order to target the brokers in China. We then listed on Alibaba. I would say that if you want to know a more realistic price of what you’re going to get. The other issue with Alibaba is that there’s a large range usually, and you don’t know what you’re going to end up paying. You have to wait to communicate with sellers. In 1688, the price that’s there is pretty much what you’re going to end up paying. You can sometimes negotiate a better price, but it’s not usually going to be more. And so you know the price before you even contact them and you can get it. You can validate a product or the margin on a product very quickly just by looking. Now, because it is in Chinese, it’s also in Chinese currency. You have to take the number that’s there, and you have to divide by the current exchange rate, which right now I think a 6.8, so whenever you’re listening, you can maybe look that up. What $1 is right now is about 6.8 RMB. Take the number, you divide it by 6.8. That’s going to be your price in US dollars. And then you know, you want to make sure that you’re going to have a margin before you even bother reaching out to get and order samples.

Bradley Sutton: All right. What are some things that you would suggest as things that they should be looking out for? Either thing to avoid or things that they should be looking for when they’re searching, looking for a product to sell on Amazon. Let’s take a step, even back before the sourcing stage, there’s the whole product research phase, so what are some tips you can give us as far as that stage goes?

Brandon Young: Yeah, this is one of the things that we really homed in on, I think. I think product selection is really what makes and breaks a business. A lot of people make the wrong decision or they fall in love with the product. What we do in our process is that we look at the demand that’s already on Amazon. Our mantra is that you cannot create demand on Amazon. And so just as you can’t create it, you can’t really destroy it either. You can only work within it. What we do is we’ll look at Helium 10, for example. We’ll look at the top 10 sellers; we’ll look at how they’re getting their sales. Once we have an idea of how the best sellers are getting their sales, which keywords are there on the first page for, what’s the search volume of those keywords, we then put it into a chart.  We manipulate the data a little bit, and we put a little bit of formula on it, and then we can come up with our own list of relevant keywords. And if we have a lot of relevant keywords, then it means that there’s a lot of opportunities. So the things to avoid our products with very few ways people are searching for them. And so we try to create just an arbitrary line at like 500 exact searches a month. I think anything below 500 exact searches tends to be something that’s not making a significant dent or a number of sales per month. So you kind of have to draw the line somewhere. We just draw it at 500, but let’s say that something only has eight keywords that are relevant that have at least 500 searches. That’s a product we’re probably going to avoid because that means that anyone, no matter how bad they are at selling at Amazon, can challenge us on this product very easily because there aren’t many ways for us to have an advantage over them, and they can easily find the keywords—just stumble across them even or get lucky and find them. And what ends up happening with products with very few keywords is that you have a shorter life cycle. Your product’s not going to be as profitable for as long, and you’re constantly going to be battling against other sellers. It’s going to become saturated much faster. Our advantage is that we can use tools like Helium 10. We can identify an entire market of keywords. So that’s the master keyword list as we call it, and we can make a determination how, why the opportunity is based on a number of keywords.

Brandon Young: The second part of that is that we like to look at how good the sellers are selling on that product. If we look at the first seller and he’s on 75% of those keywords that are over 500 search volume—let’s say he’s on 30 out of 40 of them and then the next guy is only on 25 of them and the next guy’s only on 20 of them, and then the rest of the sellers, the best sellers after that are on less than half—that’s a product that we would consider medium to low risk. It’s something that we would probably want to go after. So we use that data and we determine how wide open the opportunity is based on keywords and then we determine the risk based on how good the sellers are that we’re going up against. And if we don’t check those boxes. If it’s not something that we think has a lot of ways people are looking for it, if we think that the sellers are really good at it, then we’re going to avoid that product. We’re just going to walk away. But if the seller selling it isn’t very good and there’s a lot of opportunities for us to come in and improve upon what they’re doing, rank on more keywords that are relevant, then we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to move to that sourcing part where we’re going to validate that product on a margin perspective, and then maybe even move to ordering samples.

Bradley Sutton: What are some indicators for you as far as if the competition is too much or not? You know, you talked a little bit about that towards the end there, but what kind of things are you looking at? Like a number of reviews or star rating or what else?

Brandon Young: Yeah, that’s one of the things that I really don’t—. I mean, ratings of course. I think if the top five sellers are on all of the keywords and have a thousand reviews or more than it’s something, but, you know, it’s possible for someone that is a major brand to only be on three of 30 good keywords and have a thousand reviews. I don’t care about that competitor. And that’s what’s always bothered me. And one of the reasons that I got into teaching and mentoring beyond, you know, just doing it ourselves is because I hear advice from different people that have podcasts or teach or whatever, and they’re like, “okay, this is all you have to look at. All you have to look at is how many sales they make a month, and how good their star rating is and how many reviews. And that should tell you whether to do a product.” No. There’s real data that you can look at. And so what I care more about is what is the total demand of the market? What are all the keywords that people are using to find these products? And then how good are the sellers meeting that demand? And if they’re not meeting that demand, then I can walk right in and I can compete with them. So that’s what I care about. If I think that all of them have four and a half stars and I can put out just as good of a product and maintain a four and a half or five star rating, and even if they have a thousand reviews, but then again, they’re only on five of 40 good keywords, I’m going to step right up and I’m going to challenge them because I’m going to be able to rank for more of those keywords that they’re on. I’m going to try to get on all 40 of those keywords.

Bradley Sutton: I like that because that’s something that I agree is not taught enough. Do you know? Yes. It is important to look at the barrier of entry, I guess. Some of those things might be indications of that as far as, you know, optimized listing or number of reviews or if everybody’s got bad reviews. You need to take it a step further and actually see. How much demand overall there is. That’s one of the first times I’ve heard somebody say that. So that’s pretty cool. All right, so let’s go back to our journey now.  I’m sure you use some of these tactics ever since the beginning in order to find the products and then you sourced them from China. We’re still about two, three years ago. You’re making that change from wholesale to private labels. Pick up that story where we left off.

Brandon Young: Well, unfortunately, we didn’t figure all that out very early on. And we were doing it the way that I was just mentioning where we were kind of just looking at the jungle scout data and then we were thinking that was enough and it really isn’t.  We made mistakes. We chose the wrong products, but some of our failures were some of our biggest breakthroughs. And recently there was a post on a group that was talking about that and I think that the biggest breakthrough for us was a failure that we had with a Lego set. It was not Lego obviously, but it was a brick set that had lights in it. And so something that you can construct a set out of like cars, planes, whatever. And it lit up. So it had different bricks in it that actually light up. What we learned by that failure is that there were no good keywords to sell that product on. There’s a competitor with a brand name, not Lego, that sells a similar set. And then there was Lego. And if someone’s searching for Lego, what we realized is that they want Lego. And if someone’s searching for bulk bricks or bricks by the pound, they don’t want to set and they don’t want a generic set, they’re looking for just bricks. So we needed to really understand how competitors or how a product would sell before we choose to do it. And that was like a real big turning point for us.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. So where in your journey did you get this secret sauce figured out? I mean, how many swings and misses did you have until you figured this out?

Brandon Young: I mean, I would say our success rate was well below 50% for the first year and a half.

Bradley Sutton: I don’t like your failures, but I think that’s important that people understand that. You know, sometimes people think, “aw man, if I do everything the right way or if I’m starting off, I should always succeed, or at least three out of four.” But guys, if your success rate is 50% or less, don’t be like other people and just give up. Say, “ah, I’m not made for this,” just keep going. Because imagine if Brandon three years ago before he really started taking off, if he just got frustrated with his, with his Ls that he was taking or his losses and just gave up he wouldn’t be giving out Teslas today. So that’s really cool that you’re willing to share that you had a definitely a failing grade, more than 50%, you failed. So anyway, as you went on, you’re failing 50% of the time or more, you started figuring out the formula, really homing in on things. Was there a moment where things just really started taking off? Like was there a, I don’t know, like a black Friday or a prime day, where were you guys kind of blew up and then never looked back from there? Or was your rise kind of just gradual through the last couple of years?

Brandon Young: You know, it’s been a pretty aggressive rise, but we’ve had products that have generated a lot of revenue with not a lot of profit too, and so what we’ve done is we’ve tried to become more lean. Our growth chart is not straight up or at a pretty straight line upwards. So, I think that once you really start to understand how to select the right products and how to do the keyword research, our success rate is probably over 80% now. We have maybe 15, 20% of the products that might not make us any money. About 30% of the products we probably won’t continue with, but we won’t lose any money. And then the other 50% we’re going to continue doing. And it’s that 30% where you don’t necessarily lose any money, but your margin is really tight. That’s the fluctuation that you see in your revenue. And I would say a year and a half ago, around Q4 of 2017 was really big for us. We positioned ourselves really well. We had started to understand keywords better. We had started to do some marketing off Amazon to rank for these keywords on that we felt were underserved or had that our competitors necessarily weren’t taking care of.

Bradley Sutton: Okay.

Brandon Young: Well at least ranked on. And so, when in 2017 Q4, we started averaging between $400,000 and $500,000 a month between our accounts. And that whole next year at 2018 was just a big year for us. We did close to 6 million last year. And I think that understanding when to cut a product loose. Just repeating the same processes and then refining your processes over and over is all you can do in this business because things are constantly changing. And for us, we’ve broken it down into what is our keyword research process? What is our sourcing process? What is our optimization, what does our logistics look like? And then what’s our launch process? And then that launch process is everything from on Amazon PPC, to off Amazon, rebate key. And we use ManyChat and chatbots. We’re hitting it from many different angles, but it’s something that we’re constantly refining and changing as Amazon changes.

Bradley Sutton: Interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about your launch strategy? Do you have any PPC only launches or do you always mix in off, you know, like you know, launching websites or just Facebook?  You mentioned how it varies. Do you have just a standard SOP that you go with or it’s pretty much different depending on the product?

Brandon Young: Yeah, each product is slightly different. But I would say that anyone that tells you that you can just do a PPC only launch. I would guarantee that the majority of their products are failing. The reason is this: the way that Amazon’s algorithm works are that in order to rank higher on a product, and you guys touch on this with your CPR method, right?  In order to rank higher on a specific keyword over your competitors, you just need to generate more sales through that search term than your competitors. And the issue becomes maybe PPC sales are only generating eight sales a day, but your competitor is generating 10 sales a day organically. You know, maybe the top 10 sellers are generating at least 10 sales. You’ll never break into the top 10 even if you’ve got a 100% of all the PPC sales through that keyword that day. Now the other part of that is that the way the algorithm works, when you get sales on your product, no matter how they come in, you’re getting a sum amount of credit for different keywords. You’ll get credit for the way that you built your listing. And so that’s another thing. You need to look at your keyword list and optimize your listing and prioritize your search volume and your relevancy, your relevant keywords and the ones with the highest search volume. Your competitors who are already established on 20 keywords, the first page of 20 keywords out of 40, they’re not as optimized as they could be, but they’re still getting sales from 20 different keywords. They’re getting credit for the main keyword. You’re trying to beat them on 19 other ways that you’re not when you first launch if you’re only targeting that main keyword.

Brandon Young: Of course, if you’re only doing PPC and you expect to generate enough sales out of your PPC to beat someone that’s already on 20 keywords and has already ranked ahead of you, and probably getting more sales on that keyword than just the PPC can generate on that keyword. You’re out of your mind. It’s never going to happen. So PPC only launches are not going to work. Now, what does that lead you to do then? Then you have to generate sales and do marketing outside of Amazon. You have to generate either through giveaways and the biggest thing a year ago or for the last few years was that you were using launch services, you know, Viral Launch and Zon Jump and things. But now Amazon’s moved in a direction where they don’t like heavily discounted sales.

Brandon Young: And think about it from an ROI perspective, Amazon makes less money when you discount the product 99%. Right?  They don’t mind necessarily if you have a full sale. We’re generating full sales; we’re running some kind of rebate on the back end with rebate key or with our Search Find Buy URLs in our ManyChat flows and things. And I think that by generating those sales elsewhere with other services or other places, now we can beat our competitors for a period of time in order to get that rank ahead of them. Whether you stay there is another story, but that’s, that’s all optimization and everything.

Bradley Sutton: Okay. So PPC only for launch definitely is a no go in your opinion. But what role does PPC play in your launches? And actually, right after the launch, how do you strategize your PPC?

Brandon Young: Yeah, PPC is still vital. It’s still really, really important. It’s actually become more, more important lately than I used to value it as far as launches go. I would use PPC mostly just for defense for a long time. But I think that you need to be very aggressive because you need to start to strangle those extra sales that your competitors are getting. And you need to help Amazon see the relevancy. So I think that Amazon’s algorithm has changed over the last six to nine months to where they’re valuing an exact phrase a lot more than they used to. They’re also valuing their PPC sales more than they used to, for rank. You can tell Amazon what you’re relevant for if you can generate PPC sales. So even when you first launch, even if you have people go and buy your PPC, from your ad for example, now you’re triggering that to Amazon. This is a relevant keyword for this product because otherwise they might have a hard time and you might not get indexed properly or you might not be able to get impressions on your PPC campaigns at all. We’re either very aggressive on the PPC or we’re a bottom-up where we start with a low bid and then we start to optimize up. And what determines that with our PPC is a couple of different things. It’s the margin of the product, the competitiveness, how many variations there are and also the design element to the product. If it’s something with a lot of design or fashion oriented, then you want to expect that you’re going to have a lower click-through rate and a lower conversion rate, and you don’t want to necessarily start with a very high bid there. It’s going to be very expensive. So, there’s a different strategy we use there altogether.

Bradley Sutton: I think this is very helpful. I can just feel people writing notes down. They’re already on page two of their notes for all these other great tips they that you’re giving. Now, what about relaunching a mature product. You’re selling it for a year, you’ve noticed some of your keyword rankings have dipped. Do you just kind of slowly phasing it out? Do you try and update the product and relaunch a brand new product? Like “Hey, this is an updated version of the 2016 version of this” or do you do a launch strategy on the existing ASIN since it has good reviews or what can you tell us about your relaunch strategy?

Brandon Young: Well, first you have to diagnose why you’re not doing as well. You have to look at the competition. Is it pricing? You’re at that point, you’re just not converting as well as your competitors. And what a lot of people do is that without changing anything, they’ll just throw a bunch of money at it and try to bring the rank back up. But they didn’t diagnose the root cause. The root cause was that you’re no longer converting as well as you used to. If your competitors are all going to be converting a better than you, then even if you get ahead of them for a period of time, you’re just going to slide back anyway. What we need to do at that point is to determine whether our pricing is competitive still. We need to Redo the main listing images. We need to look at an enhanced brand content.

We need to make sure that we’re brand registered, and we have a video on it.  We’re doing everything we can try to move the bar a couple of points on the conversion side. And so there’s a lot that we do to optimize the listing and then go back and then concentrate on the launch. What you need to know though is if it’s a product that failed from the very beginning and you don’t have many reviews, you’ve lost what’s called the honeymoon period, which is that that period of time when you first launch, and it might be worth just pulling the inventory and sending it into a new listing and then trying again with a slightly different approach. Because the honeymoon period is so powerful that you have no negative history because you’re getting ranked based on your sales. But Amazon is not looking at that very day. They’re looking at a series of averages. They’re averaging in your sales for the last day, the last three days, the last seven days, the last 30 days and even longer. But when you first launched, you have none of those other numbers to average in. So, you have no zeros or low numbers to average in.  And it’s much easier to launch in that honeymoon period when you first launched than it is to try to revitalize something that has a lot of negative history.

Bradley Sutton: Have you ever measured how long that a honeymoon period lasts in your experience for your products?

Brandon Young: Yeah, the school of thought right now, I think amongst the guys that I talk to regularly and strategize with regularly is between 18 and 23 days, that’s the best we can get. I don’t think it’s very much longer than that.

Bradley Sutton: How do you take advantage of that?  What I’ve been telling people, and I don’t even know if this is right, but I say, “Oh, you got to create your listing,” obviously to be able to have an FNSKU number in order to send your inventory into FBA.  I say, “Hey, don’t create your listing a month before your inventories even get there.” Once you’re ready, once your inventory is ready to ship to Amazon, create your listening at that time, have it open just so you can send it and then close the listing after you’ve sent it in. So that while it’s in transit, isn’t that saving days from that honeymoon period or is that it? Am I just giving people a bunch of nonsense?

Brandon Young: You’re partially right. There are two other things they need to do. They want to keep the listing suppressed. What they should do is not upload the images. The other thing that they can do is on the backend when you’re creating the listing, you can put a launch date for the product, like a first available. There are several different dates you can put in your backend, like the first available date and then your launch date. Put those a year out in the future and then the day you’re actually ready to launch when the stuff is there, and it’s checked in and it’s available. Then you can add your images and change those dates to the current day. And then what that’ll do is it’ll trigger your honeymoon period as being from that day and you can hit the ground running. So yeah, you were on the right track.

Bradley Sutton: Ah, that’s very viable. I think my way was a lot harder and a lot weirder, but I had no idea that just by having a listening suppressed it’s not counting towards the honeymoon period. That’s great info.

Brandon Young: And you could keep it closed and make sure it’s still suppressed. And then also have the dates out. Like all three of those things combined is just like triple checks. But you should do everything you can to try to keep that honeymoon period. Otherwise, you’re going to have a hard time trying to launch and a lot of launches start with a lot of negative history and you end up way behind the eight balls.

Bradley Sutton: Okay, cool. 30 minutes already, I can’t believe the time has flown by here. Some last words of wisdom about one thing that irritates you the most that you see out there on Facebook or from gurus or whatever, some misinformation that’s out there that you see people follow and just like really gets under your skin. What would that be?

Brandon Young: Just one?

Bradley Sutton:  I know we could have another episode just dedicated to that, but is there one specific thing other than, what was it that you just mentioned earlier on just looking at the star rating or a number of reviews as far as product research. But other than that, what is one thing that really gets under your skin that people are being misled about?

Brandon Young: I think the software and not doing the proper research in advance. I think product selection—I don’t think people are doing and looking at the data enough. I think that Amazon private label is a solved game. And I think that if you look at the data, it’s very clear how to rate products that you could potentially do. You can look at the opportunity score, you can assign a risk score. And if I have a pipeline of 50 products, I can let the cream rise to the top. I can take all the ones with the most opportunity in the lowest risk and I can just keep doing those products in order to maximize my opportunity. Right. I think that what I see constantly is misinformation about how to find potential products, how to judge whether to do them. And I see all these other fake gurus putting out lists of the top thousand products to do in 2019 type of thing. You don’t want to do the same thing that 10,000 other sellers are going to do. That’s how you ended up doing a scratch off map and you’re on page 15 with 5,000 other people that got duped into doing it. You want to do your own research. You want to look at the numbers, work backward and then find your own products. And I think that you just need to learn how to do it yourself instead of trying to follow the advice of people that aren’t very good or selling themselves. That’s the other thing that bothers me is when these self-proclaimed gurus aren’t even sellers.

Bradley Sutton: Yeah. I think you and I are in the same boat as far as that goes. Well this is all been very valuable information and I know in your course, in your masterclasses, this is just, you know, a small tidbit of what people can get from those. If people want to learn more from you or contact you or try and get a free Tesla, how can they reach you? How can they find you on the interwebs?

Brandon Young: I think the easiest way is my website, which is brandonmyoung.com. Or you can join my public Facebook group, which is seller systems succeeding on Amazon. And you can always message me on Facebook as well. I’m always an open book and willing to help.

Bradley Sutton: All right, well, Brandon, thank you so much for your time. I know you’re a busy guy. I really appreciate you coming on here and helping all of us out with this and we’ll definitely want you back on a future episode. So thanks again.