How He Makes $150,000/Month with an Amazon FBA Business (2021)

we are featuring the founder of shed defender who's going to share how he identified a potential problem how he solved it and turned it into a business that rakes in 150 000 a month today he will share how you too can leverage amazon fba and build your own brand and get noticed also what their online growth strategy is and what challenges they face working with amazon fba lastly he will share with us what their experience was like on shark tank and how that impacted their business it just went viral i woke up and i had like 100 sales we did 1.4 million gross it's great brand awareness people see your product sales go up but yeah we get a real good return on ad spend through amazon which is nice the platform is so big you're just losing money if you don't that is a leash you guys need to have in your arsenal can you walk us through just a quick evolution of getting a new product into mass production that makes or break your product they do it for you i mean you send your product in you don't have to worry about shipping and returns it's all automated all right you guys we are here with tyson the founder of shed defender um and we'll just dive straight into it tyson tell us a little bit about yourself your background and how you came up with this idea called shed defender well this is harley by saint bernard and uh i got her in college and i got tired of people complaining about the shedding and everywhere i went she just would have balls of hair everywhere so i searched and searched and there's no products out there like it so i came up with the idea to wrap her up in a shirt and contain the shedding that's it uh for the most part yeah there's nothing out there so it's kind of easy concept for me to think okay i think this would be good for many other dog owners out there because it's such a big problem right and then it just kind of evolved into what i see here yeah my mom actually sewed the first prototype uh i started small then found a seamstress off craigslist and then a few years later we had a working product so let's talk about expense a little bit what what was your initial investment into starting shed defender how much money did you have in hand well before shark tank what was the biggest expense at that point how it started as we kind of went viral overnight so i didn't have any money invested in it it just went viral i woke up and i had like 100 sales yeah with the with the model that your mom sowed first and then yeah i was trying to sell online um it was pretty much a passion project so it's only maybe five a month with this little seamstress you could make one a day maybe and then in one viral video and next thing i had hundreds of orders interesting so i had to get a small loan for my parents to pay for to get the fabric find a manufacturer in san francisco and fulfill upwards of a thousand orders within like the next two months okay so let's talk about what cost the most within those first two months is it manufacturing and fabric so i think um the first initial loan for my parents was about 30 i think 30 000 um and then throughout the first year all in all i think it was roughly 140 000 just to keep up with demand since we just you know overnight had all these orders so yeah started with that then after that we just kind of grew organically what was your revenue in 2020 and you know break the revenue down from us in terms of product wise yeah so last year we had a pretty good year even due to covet um you know complications and everything uh we did 1.4 million gross nice um yeah it's gross but 20 year-over-year growth which is great and how much of that came from amazon probably about 65 and then the rest and the rest is our site uh we sell on chewy.com and

then we have some small wholesale businesses mom and pop shops that we go to okay [Music] talk about shark tank how did that impact the business overall uh people do people recognize you on the street and say oh my gosh that's tyson we saw him on shark tank how's life now after after that experience i thought they'd recognize me after shark tank but uh no they recognized her so she can get some recognition nice but uh not me yet but yeah it definitely helped um it's a great experience it's great brand awareness people see your products sales go up it can be somewhat short-lived but you know people forget about it but it keeps re-airing maybe like every four to six months so you still get that continual uptick which is great as far as revenue though uh so when did you go to shark tank what year we were uh 2018 season 10. and at that point were you selling this exact product already yeah so we just had the one product now we have kind of a whole line of products but it was just the one product we're about a year and a half in so we're still kind of in our baby phase but we still have good numbers and the sharks are all impressed why don't you walk us through the numbers uh we've done one point two million in states oh good for you [Music] how do you break down the profit margins like if you take uh this product here right which is your best seller just the black shed defender yeah what does it cost you to make and uh so anywhere roughly we have nine different sizes so they do vary quite a bit so from the mini size up to the giant they can range from you know anywhere from maybe seven dollars you know upwards to 15 to manufacture yeah okay um sometimes it can be more expensive we do produce domestically sometimes two so those costs are higher but yeah all in all our margins are you know anywhere from 40 to 70 just depending on what sales channel we're at either our site amazon or wholesale what's the strategy for growing your business on amazon and tips tricks anything you can share with us so amazon the main thing is you definitely want to be on fba so you can get you know quick shipping and they can handle all that so i mean that's definitely i would say number one also uh reviews that makes or break your product and that can be the hardest thing to do because there's a lot of things in place so you know amazon policy you don't abuse it by paying for reviews and things like that some overseas companies do so reviews are the best way to do it so there's a couple there's a program called vine and you can um for new products so you can give out free products to people and they'll review it for you which helps you get um at least you know anything from five to twenty reviews but even that alone can help you rank better because that's what amazon is just a crazy algorithm that goes with reviews rank price product imaging getting your brand store page up just to make it look as professional as possible and all those play a role in like how your product gets ranked in amazon search besides vine are you using any other tactic to get more reviews um direct customer read you know communication you're not allowed to technically they do have a new feature that you can email them there's a button you can push actually that says request to review from them but yeah there's not a whole lot you can do necessarily just good customer service and having a good product and just hoping they you know i don't get a pregnant one i don't get the fact that you can't ask your customer to review your i don't know people have just abused it you know anything from you're not supposed to use their address but some people send postcards like write a review but they don't want the customer to be bothered there's too many people abuse it and they want to be in between you and the customer yeah to some extent okay yeah so it can be tough but yeah reviews is is definitely the thing and then for us expanding our product line was big uh one product is great but you know the more products you have the better it's going to go because a lot of times when we launched our leash now it says frequently bought together and it's nice our shed defender plus the onesie or the shampoo so you can get bundle deals and uh they kind of piggyback off each other that makes sense [Music] well can we go try that new product we haven't developed i'd love to show you how it works all right let's go find the big dog all right what's his name again her name's harley harley okay she's my 12 year old saint bernard man you've had it for a long time the original model that is awesome hey harley hey girl we're gonna we're gonna do a test on you and show our audience how this new um and this guy's all excited just to be in the shot here so you wrap it up and you can move the magnet anyway yeah they slide so you can adjust if it's a little tight you can add a little bit of room nice and then all magnets slide right there's none that it's permanently finished the two middle ones slide gotcha but yeah once it's on good to go she can wear it that is super convenient yeah it fits and then when you're done say you need it we're walking down the street another dog comes up you can just simply unravel it like that and you're good to go that is a leash you guys need to have in your arsenal that is for sure pretty excited about it when do you expect to sort of release it to um hopefully around august is kind of our tentative date to release it okay [Music] tyson tell us just a little bit about your shark tank experience our audience love to hear because everyone has a different experience getting on it some take two years to apply others get a phone call uh what was like for you what did you do to prepare how long did it take from the moment you got the call just everything anything shared all the fun yeah i mean i've been told to try and apply for years and years and years but i just didn't think i was ready yet and then we were actually lucky enough for the producers one of them to reach out to us and ask if we wanted to actually apply so they helped us go through and make the video so they kind of held us held their hand through the whole process which was great it kind of kind of got lucky there yeah i guess kind of cut in line i don't know but uh yeah it was it was great because uh we weren't sure if we're gonna do it on our own were you camera shy would you what did you do personally to prepare yeah i mean definitely we prepared a lot thanks to casey my sister-in-law we did a lot of preparation for it yeah we even hired like a professional like media person like help us out and train so we were over prepared but that definitely helped us so there's no hesitation no pauses we knew the numbers and you know turned out we got a deal so it was definitely well worth doing all that practice and preparation let's talk about fba on amazon right because you're what's the percentage of your business on fba they probably do about probably 65 so it's a big portion of our business it is okay people just feel like they can trust amazon and order through prime and get it you know in a day so they take 15 off just across the top okay uh they're doing all your fulfillment no i have a fulfillment center and then they i send orders or bulk orders into amazon and then they fulfill the orders okay so they have it on stock so essentially i've got two fulfillment centers amazon and my own but so they you pay the 15 and then you also pay just normal shipping fees maybe three dollars four dollars per unit as well okay what else can you share about fba the the pros the cons what do you see changing or not changing let's just dive into that a little bit i mean honestly i was kind of weary of getting into it a few years ago because you know the margins do go down a little bit but the platform is so big you're just losing money if you don't so it just it helps the advertising i can get in front of the right people with their own advertising on their platform it just it's for me it's just more eyes more visits to you know our store on there and people some just go towards amazon to buy things now so you know we'd like to mix it up a little bit more and get more people on our site but you know there's only so much you can do [Music] everyone's curious about what happens after you get the deal or didn't get the deal what happened with you as far as deal making unsure tank yeah so on the show we did get three offers uh we ended up going with lori deal yes great we'll take it all right and so we got a deal on the show you know you shake your hand and everything and then eventually we both kind of mutually decided it wasn't necessarily a good fit for us we wanted more of our strategic partners going to be more involved in the business so we decided not to do it and then eventually found uh private equity a few months later afterwards which what where did that happen i mean um uh pet summit events in austin so it's just a place to meet private equity or um distributors and stuff like that and one company um that we reached out to was interested and uh did they notice you or recognize no they hadn't actually watched the shark tank but knowing we were on it is always something that piques their interest you know they know that we got on for you know a reason we're a legitimate company um and you know gave them their number our numbers and like i said they were impressed and then it took about a year but we finally signed them on and they've helped us kind of grow the brand and help with uh strategic partnership that you know we were looking for nice [Music] what are some challenges in running a business on amazon i mean it's in every wall ever evolving world right it is so keeping up with the algorithm you know from advertising to ranking and search is probably the biggest one because nobody really knows how it works uh one day it's this the other day it is and so you can hire some marketing agencies that are professionals and they'll tell you this but then you can hear another thing so yeah just evolving with amazon and how it you know ranks and all that stuff is probably maybe the biggest challenge yeah i just wonder what you can do to research all that and be on on top of it you know what i mean like is there is there anything you can do i mean what are you doing it's hard there's actually a couple apps that you can get that show certain attributes and search results search terms and stuff like that one called jungle scout that's really good so it's an add-on um and then you can also investigate other competitors products and kind of compare it to yours as well okay and just basically have a great product make sure you have a great service yeah make sure your search terms are online it can kind of help you create and evaluate your listings and you just hope they know what they're doing but usually the jungle scout's a really good one that's pretty reputable okay [Music] how do you market your uh amazon site and also what do you do to expose your site as well what tips and tricks yeah so amazon we actually have a agency based out of india um they're kind of amazon employees so they help me with all these sponsored ads on amazon so you do run ads there yeah we do uh how much are you spending crucial we do right now roughly i think our budget's like six thousand a month okay at the moment but yeah we get a real good return on ad spend through amazon which is nice and then with our site we have an agency that does our google page search and then our social media site or ads which is usually just a lot of brand awareness and then retargeting you know if they saw our site uh they'll get another ad so they come back and buy with a discount and things like that is that how much is that in addition to the six on amazon that goes there you know all in all we spend our budgets between like 15 and 18 000 a month wow okay yeah just to get the product brand out there yeah and especially with our new products we're really trying to push the brand awareness and make sure people know about it so yeah the returns returns there so it's worth spending that money [Music] let's touch on real quick on how to identify demand for new products right especially in your line of industry right so for us some of it was just getting feedback from the customers you know with the original shed defender um like people wanted one so they could go outside so we created the sport so the dogs can use the bathroom other ideas just come from just looking at the market uh seeing what's trending that's what we kind of came up with to soft juice it's like the fastest little niche growing in the pet industry they're just getting bought up by everybody um so just following trends is probably the main thing and customer feedback reviews stuff like that just kind of gauging on what the customer would like and incorporate into your whole you know blend of products do you have a system where have you done in the past where you did reach out to customers says hey guys give us feedback constructive feedback what works what doesn't or we may do that by themselves we have in email marketing um software that does like have a little survey after each purchase but then you know and one thing we use is instagram when we're trying to figure out what new patterns or colors to do for the onesies um we give them a list of maybe do would you guys like to see camo or a festive color or something so they would kind of like get their feedback engage it based on the survey on you know an instagram story or something like that okay yeah so follow trendlines and probably customer feedback is the two pillars now let's get some blitz questions with tyson tyson if you could win a lottery today i mean a fortune that would last you a lifetime would you give this business up no i'd advertise the hell out of it and just grow it as fast as i could and then maybe sell it man i'm a true entrepreneur right there what was the first thing that pushed you to start working on this business um this baby right here tom the weeds were here okay what's one of your hidden talents can you show us can you tell us you know i can't show because i my hidden talents just getting lucky i'm just a lucky individual i guess okay what's one of the news that you would like to wake up tomorrow that i won the lottery you won the lottery okay when you are not running a business what would you find what would we find you doing um either going to the gym or ideally golfing okay i like this question it's kind of a weird one but let's say if aliens show up tomorrow and they shut every business down and they come to your doorstep and say we need to shut you down what would you tell them to convince them to stay open oh god i don't know i don't think i need to stay open if aliens were here i mean the world's going to change are they conquering that i don't know let's you got to convince them i need to stay open and here's why i just invite him in my house and have harley not wear a shed defender there you go you'd probably be pretty confident they would say put that thing on yeah okay awesome [Music] let's talk about design cool stuff different colors do you have anybody designing your product who helps you with that um i guess i'm the designer so i did i mean i had a pattern maker help me kind of gave them the directions of what to do and it continually evolves i'm still always kind of manipulating the pattern to fit better and better yeah i tell them what i want and then you know it's all digital they go on their computer and they can you know adjust this and do this so yeah it's a lot of kind of just testing it out see if it works go back to the drawing board a lot of back and forth it doesn't change much does it or are you continually evolving the design it doesn't change that much but it's just hard with so many different sized dogs even with nine sizes they all don't fit like they do perfectly some dogs are perfect some dogs are tough so you know we did evolve into making a sport version that doesn't zip up all the way so then the dog can actually go to the bathroom outside things like that so we evolve the product to you know kind of cater to different uses but in a sense no it stays to its core pattern okay [Music] so as far as your product manufacturing who does that and can you walk us through just a quick evolution of getting a new product into mass production um yeah it's quite the process um but now we manufacture overseas we do some domestic manufacturing as well so we'll have some small releases different patterns fun patterns we do like camo print leopard print stuff like that but yeah bulk of it's from overseas just due to pricing costs you just really can't get it done here unfortunately for the price you you'd want to do it or if you didn't someone else would probably do it for cheaper hopefully that'll change soon yeah um but yeah it's it's tough so you got to get you know for the shed defender you got to make the patterns you got to get them digitalized and then you send that over and from there they can pretty much kind of figure it out but you got to help them source the zipper so we have like custom ykk zippers um the right thread there's a lot of little details you got to give them right you know we have a good pattern maker who kind of helped us source all that stuff to begin with and then you know our manufacturer going to source those things overseas as well and kind of mimic what we have here [Music] what have you learned by running a business through fba right any tips tricks in terms of just really maximizing your profits within that platform yeah i mean at least the good thing about fba is they do it for you i mean you send your product and you don't have to worry about shipping and returns it's all automated so it's a good place to start it definitely helps you out in a lot of ways like that but for tips and tricks of anything i would just make sure if you're going to be on it too find a good agency that you can help market with their sponsored brands within amazon you got to put some money into it but the returns are really good if you do it right so they can really help jump start the business how do you manage inventory when it's handled by a different company what what what can you say on that amazon makes it pretty easy um so i have my main fulfillment center here in la okay and when i need to uh replenish my inventory for fba i just send a bulk order in you know whether it's 500 units 2000 units into one warehouse that's close to where my film center is and then from there they disperse it throughout their network so it makes it super simple you can see what's left though oh yeah keep track there's inventory alerts they can forecast for you so uh you know what's trending so i mean they give you the tools that you need to uh help you out and make sure you don't run in any hiccups and inventory issues hence you pay them what the 15 exactly to provide all that services yeah [Music] what about product delays from manufacturers you know when you depend on those guys to produce a certain amount of inventory yeah that's how does that impact how does that impact your relationship with customers how do you deal with that yeah we've had that issue a lot anywhere from the first manufacturing run we did because we already had a thousand people waiting yeah so i kept taking orders when i probably shouldn't have and my seamstress making one a day or five a day couldn't keep up so constant contact emailing them you know telling them but yeah you gotta expect delays and i usually have a hard time with like thinking okay it's gonna be here at this time it's always weeks later months later so you just have to keep that in mind so ordering correctly forecasting and just expecting the unexpected you know with covid everything slowed down so much so shipping was delayed so you just got to be realistic about it and make sure your customers are aware you know that hey shipping might be slow due to covid as long as you're transparent with your customers that's the most important thing [Music] what do you do for like pre-launch for new products anytime special advertisement how early do you start on that that's always a tough one because that goes back to planning and expecting delays too um say for the soft chews that we're developing we're launching that this week so anything from getting the website ready your amazon listing getting the product pictures which is the big one and getting you know all the info and description out there so we're just going to launch we have an email campaign that we're going to blast do all our customers we have sms text blasts that we can email them and then [Music] paid social as well um the traditional you know advertising markets or channels that we're doing right now we're just going to kind of blow that up and get the brand awareness out there like day of or a week before pretty much timing important tomorrow is probably the first day we'll take sales so that's probably the same day we'll do you know all our email blasts and everything we don't have a huge launch day and make like a huge deal about it necessarily it's just mainly getting our current customers aware of it and then from there we'll get some brand awareness sent out into the world via social media you've been featured also on some really cool uh publications you know mashable buzzfeed yeah today.com yeah how did those things happen how did they impact the business what can you share about that i mean really once again it's just getting lucky because people see our product and first they think it's a joke they don't know what it is so i mean that helps us out with like you know advertising just viral videos so buzzfeed they reached out to me and i thought i was doing a phone interview and next thing no zoom popped up and i didn't i wasn't prepared at all i just woke up all my hair's a mess and stuff but it's like a 15 minute like video but i ended up getting like 18 million views that they aired they didn't say they were gonna call in the morning when you're waking up or anything um i you know what it was the first year we're in business and i didn't really know what i was doing with the business so i was not prepared but it still became yeah a viral video and it was it was great just getting lucky with these social media sites online is just awesome do you see a huge boost in sales yeah those things oh yeah it was in june of i think 2017 and it definitely it was a great month for us it doesn't hurt to keep getting more of those exposures oh it's great it definitely winds down now we don't get too many of them because you know people are kind of aware of our brand and know what it is now um but you know occasionally sometimes you know something comes out and you know maybe like up flip so yeah that helps you know get it out there for us it's great awesome [Music] there's a lot obviously to this whole process right yeah i'm just curious how we could break it down into the three to four most important pillars for viewers watching right now and just wondering man how do i get my product into xyz even my own store what would you say those three four things are that stand out so finding a good manufacturer is definitely the first thing you need to do obviously to actually get it done someone that's going to be reliable you can trust and obviously where the price is right as a new person i want to barge in here as a new person where where would i go to find a good manufacturer on that first step okay i got lucky they reached out to me on facebook the manufacturer that we use you just keep getting lucky it is well they saw us on one of the viral videos and he reached out and it ended up being great i flew over to hong kong and met them and did a tour um really great people what else besides supplier i guess let's touch on one more important aspect of um obviously i think just the website and getting the whole business put together so the website's key you know even if you're not going to do your own website you still got it on amazon you got to do you know a brand store from pictures to presenting your product in a professional way you just you want to legitimize it you know when we first launched sometimes we had some bad pictures well you know our website was clunky it was horrible so after we kind of fixed that up you could see our conversion rate go from less than like one percent now we're trending over three percent conversion rate on our website which is pretty good [Music] what's been the best selling product so far and is it what you expected yeah it is it's still our core onesie original onesie so the black onesies sells far better than any other color so that's still number one but we do have products that are trending upwards from the bungee leash to our shed to fan shampoo those are just this year starting to boom um you know that's why we're sold out of our shed defense shampoo we got more coming in a few weeks same thing with the leash so those two products are really picking up and then we'll see how the soft juice go those might rival the onesie so there you go yeah we hope it does tyson [Music] curious to know about covet times as well impacted a lot of businesses some failed closed down others adapted and and they were flexible you certainly did got her what are some tips and tricks how did you survive what would you suggest to other businesses that kind of adapted yeah um i mean you got to be flexible with your business for us it was kind of lucky just because we're mainly online anyways so you know we were our focus was to get into brick and mortar this last year but obviously covet you know threw us for a loop so we pivoted back to just focusing on amazon chewy.com and our own site um and just focusing on like what we have going already instead of wasting our time and money expanding into a market that is kind of obsolete at the moment we'll see if it bounces back so you're talking about like retail yeah the retail brick and mortar so that just might not be a thing we get into we might look at it later but yeah we just kind of reeled in everything that we're doing and just focused on you know our core business online [Music] to our viewers whether they're in the same industry or another industry any tips of advice from an entrepreneur to entrepreneur um anything comes to mind um yeah i mean first of all it's kind of cliche but don't give up i got laughed at for creating a dog onesie for years before it actually went big yeah you just got to keep going with it and you know don't care about what other people think eventually if it's a good product you know it'll go people understand it and you know then you'll have your own success story all right you guys as always we have an offer for you from tyson tyson tell us more about it um yeah so we have a coupon code that you can use at checkout for 20 off just type in up flip sheddefender.com

awesome thank you so much very generous of you guys take advantage of that and do it right now thank you well we really enjoy this i know our audience have as well thank you so much tyson and we wish you all the success appreciate it but there ever is thank you well that's it for today you guys i know you want to watch more we've got a lot more coming for you we appreciate you watching this video what an incredible invention execute on all the ideas we talked about hit that like button subscribe to this channel so that you don't miss any of our amazing content we're doing this for you comment below because we read all the comments we want to know who you want us to interview next thank you so much for watching

2021-07-10 19:29

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