8 Step Blueprint For Building a Successful eCommerce Business

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online
well hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson
and uh it's great that you're here so uh let me just bring there we go that's better you can see me now so welcome to
the show uh like i say it's great that you're here this show is dedicated to all of you who are in the world of e-commerce and
just want to get better at doing e-commerce business and growing your online business and in tonight's show we get to chat to
the amazing jj resnick all the way from the states uh he's going to be joining us
hopefully for the duration of the show he may have to rush off if his wife sort of starts to give birth
to their second child but we're hoping we should be okay uh and jj is going to be chatting with us about his blueprint about his eight
steps to uh building a successful online business we're going to get into all of that jj is a top bloke uh as with all folks i do
like a pre-podcast call i talked to my guests before we let them live on the show and um a little -minute
pre-podcast call turned into a bit of a marathon session that has to be honest and it was great to catch up with jj so
you're going to love him that much i do know now if this is your
first time to the show like i said big fat warm welcome but make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you get
your content and if you are listening to the show in uh an audio format through the podcast a
big warm welcome to you through your headphones uh you may not know or you may know if
you're a regular to the show that when we record the interviews we record them uh live through facebook so we broadcast
the interview through facebook live at the same time as we recall them so you can come along you can give us a thumbs up you can join
in the conversation you can add your comments and questions uh to the guests and we will get into
all of that so do check us out on facebook if you haven't done so already um just head on over to facebook.com
forward slash edmondson ceo um as in edmondson company madness and co
and you will find all the information there another good place to head to is the website matt edmondson.com all
the show notes from tonight's podcast will be on there all of the notes all of the links the links to jj everything he's
going to talk about everything that i'm going to talk about all the sponsors all the subscription links the facebook
link the youtube link all of them will be on the website so if you remember nothing else just head over to matt
edmondson.com and you will find everything you need to know right there
and i am super psyched to announce that by the end of this week uh today being monday at the time of
recording by the end of this week uh all of the new e-commerce course will be
live on the website so you can join the ecommerce masterclass um and you can download that course
we're doing a really superb special offer during the kobit lockdown and we know a lot of
people have gone through it already you can read all their testimonies i won't bore you with them uh on the podcast but trust me you will
get a lot of value out of this course we go through how just everything that i do to build
an ecommerce business so do check that out again all the details will be on the website madmanson.com
if you're watching on facebook they won't be there now they'll be there in a couple of days time it will be live by the end of this week
uh trust me so do keep an eye out for that now before we get into our conversation
with jj let me just give a big shout out as usual to our show sponsors let me give a big shout out to
one of our show sponsors curious digital you know what i love its flexibility
it's such a great platform you know how when you start out you might typically use an online platform because they're
cheap they're easy to use super accessible but you know what they aren't that flexible
and as your business grows you end up moving to an agency right
because that's just what you do and at some point you're gonna have this nightmare to deal with and it can be incredibly expensive
and the thing for me that i love about kd is it will grow with you you can start out on the
platform easily and as your business grows then kd will adapt with you now i don't
know of any other platform that does all of that so if you're in the market for a new e-commerce platform
make sure you follow the links from matt edmondson.com take advantage of the offers that
they've got for you and let me know what you think
a big shout out to another show sponsor the light bulb agency these guys basically do those
bits of e-commerce that you either don't want to do or don't have the skills or expertise to
do right it's a great service let me tell you these guys do fulfillment e-commerce
marketing content creation customer service product research i mean the list goes on so if you need
help with your own online business you're looking for ways to grow and you need some help to get there
do get in touch with them and again just follow the links from today's show notes head on over to
matt edmondson.com and you can follow the links to the light bulb agency we'd love to put you in touch with those guys
let me take just a few seconds here to tell you about my brand new e-commerce course that is perfectly designed for
those of you who are looking to build your own online business right i know it's
going to work well for you guys because we deep dive into the process that i use to build my
own ecommerce businesses we're going to look at the six key elements that you need to be aware of
for building a successful online store i'm utterly convinced it'll make a huge difference
to your business i am super proud of it let me tell you and it is brand new for it's called
the e-commerce masterclass you can check out what other people think about the course you can find out
more information on my site at matt edmondson.com
now let me read this out to you uh because i want to make sure we get this right in tonight's podcast
we are going to interview jj resnick who is an expert in working with brands to help them succeed online
in tonight's show jj and i are going to chat about his eight-step blueprint for building
a successful e-commerce business it is the exact same checklist that they use themselves whenever
they're building their own businesses so we know this works we know it's good to go this is not
theory this has been proven and tested in the real world so without further ado let's bring jj onto the show jj it is
good to see you my friend welcome to the show it's great that you're here hey matt yeah thanks for having me no
problem happy to be here all the way from where about so you're in california right
i am in marin which is about miles north of the golden gate bridge uh i love that
part of the world i just love it it is a great place if you've never been here from england
do head out it is the golden gate bridge is just stunning and you can you can hire bikes can't you
and cycle across that thing you can exactly and now now
in fact just this morning i was reading about um these new water bikes that people are
taking out there um going across the bay and it's pretty
wild never seen anything like it motorbikes yeah you can check them out in fact i
just saw a news article with conor mcgregor he was with the
princess of monaco i think it was and he was posting how they were on a water
bike race and so i was so intrigued i googled i just saw the name schiller on the side
of this thing it looks like like a boat essentially um like a small raft
with a bike on top and they're just cruising through the ocean so i google
the company and it looks like they're based out here because all their photos showing people going under the
golden gate bridge i was like there's no way i'm going out there with it's great white central out there oh is
it oh yeah great whites are flying out of the water
right around there you know the whole alcatraz people would try escaping and
most of them would be uh taken again just because of the ground
there's a lot of sharks out there so you're not going to catch me on one of those water bikes but
maybe on my golf course pond oh back here that might be fun wow living the dream
there on your golf course pond driving a water bike yeah way of the future
jj do me a favor just could you be a little bit more central on your video um it's just there we go no no it's not
that it's we do this split screen view which i know you can't see because you're joining us on skype and so we were only seeing your nose a little
bit so there we go we get full full facial features now trying to get comfortable at my desk here and
what time is it for you now it is in the morning
in the morning that's not too bad and how have you found lockdown you know
it hasn't been so bad for me honestly because i'm here in my office i've been
here in my office for the last many years only leave to
play a little golf and go to the grocery store so going into lockdown wasn't much of a
change but um you know the whole world is
a bit crazy bit chaotic right now so i feel for everybody that's
that's having to go through some some massive change but for me specifically it's just kind
of business as usual building ecom brands here in my basement
and uh that's what i love to do so so how long have you been doing that
how long have you been involved in it you know really for about a decade
oh wow i mean i i got in right around
uh as soon as my professional golf days ended my career ended uh due to a knee injury
but i mean i messed around with every type of online business you can
imagine from trying affiliate stuff to i didn't i never went into drop shipping
but if if i found a course on how to make money online
back in you better believe i was buying it so you know i was searching
for those mentors and just trying to figure it all out at that
point um so i probably spent
really four or five years at least struggling and just going from thing to
thing and it wasn't until when it all just came together with my
first ecom business what was the tipping point then what what sort of what made it to go from
being hard work to working for you well i think a lot of it
was um you know a lot of people will say luck
but i don't really believe in luck i think luck is just a you know
a combination of preparation and opportunity really just coming together you gotta be
putting yourself constantly in the right places and and throwing things at the wall and if
you do that enough times something's gonna stick and then people see that and they're like oh he got
lucky but um yeah it just it just so happened that
a friend of mine had come back from afghanistan and he his humvee was hit by an ied
and he ended long story short he ended up getting a service dog and we were at a party one night he's
telling me all about this new life of his with his service dog and how he's he had just been kicked off
of an american airlines flight going back to see his family
yeah and that just blew me away so i mean when i when i hear something like
this i'll just dig in and start just like i told you about that water bike you know i see something on the
news and i go down a rabbit hole sometimes for a couple hours just because i'm curious and and i think
that's that's probably been one of my
i guess um best attributes or strong you know just
being curious and hey we're on the curiosity podcast right
no it's true and i think curiosity is one of the most um under utilized or und and talked
about gifts if that makes sense um yeah it's it's something that i think gets talked out of you when you're in
your childhood and it really shouldn't you know you should definitely foster that gift and stay curious definitely yeah it blows me
away how so many of my friends or just people i come across we both see
the same thing and they just continue walking by and forget about it two seconds later and my
mind is going on thinking about wait a minute how's that made who's making you know who are the
competitors in this space can it be improved you know things like that so it's really
a mindset shift and that just comes i think through time
and doing this over and over but anyhow um so that next day i just started
looking into the whole industry and realized
there was a big pain point here for a lot of our disabled vets and and just disabled
americans in general and so i i set out on a mission to go and help
him and i started creating all of these um
all the service dog supplies so harnesses and vests and things like that and
i didn't do it for to make millions of dollars i i did it to to help and again
i learned afterwards i think that was really one of the other biggest things that set
that business off um you know when you're just getting into something all about the
money and that's all you care about i think you're you're going to have a tough time
uh i think you really need a bigger why and reason in everything you're doing but um
yeah i figured hey maybe it'll make me a few thousand dollars a month and be a fun side project to help
well within about six seven months i should say in the first month we hit twelve thousand dollars in sales
and i was blown away and then it just it was like twenty thousand the next month
i think by month nine we were at six figures and yeah the business just blew up
um so that was exciting but then about two years in
the industry started going in a direction that i didn't care for you started seeing um
all of these socialites who had i won't name any names but you know like the blond-haired
socialites who had their own reality tv shows and um little chihuahua dogs
and they start i started seeing their names coming through our purchase orders and i was going
this doesn't make any sense like this definitely is is not a service dog um
and that got me um i just lost passion for the industry
after that so it just so happened i i guess you could say luck again right
um i was born into a family where my great-grandmother had invented a cocktail called the
moscow mule and and uh at this point i was overseas i was at
the canton fair doing some sourcing for service dog products
and remember i was right at the end of that business i was losing my passion and i walked through a uh kitchen expo
on my way home to the hotel for the evening and it's filled with moscow mule oh
okay so we seem to have lost jj and it is reconnecting now it tells me so just
bear with us one second while we pull that on and whilst hopefully jj is coming back i
do want to emphasize this point that he was talking about that um look
it's there's a famous quote isn't there the more i prepare the luckier i seem to get i can't
remember who said it i just um i just remember someone did say that jj you're back
here yeah okay i went off for a little second there it kind of lost connection the trouble i was afraid i was rambling
on too much we just cut the feed every now and again now i was just saying whilst it was
reconnecting there i liked what you were saying about luck and about how um about how uh that quote
the the more prepared i am the luckier i seem to get or the harder i train the luckier i seem to get it's that kind of
gist of things and i can't remember who said it um but you were talking about luck again weren't you and it's like
but you're right the more you prepare the look you seem to get so let's get back to your story you're
walking through this hotel lobby um yeah and you can cut me off i tend to go on and
um on tangents sometimes so uh anyway yeah i'll finish up real quick
so i'm walking through the hotel there's moscow mule mugs everywhere and i look at my dad so it was his
grandmother my great-grandmother who had been who had invented this cocktail in
and i had inherited this original mug that she had created the cocktail in but they looked
they looked nothing like the mugs that i was seeing so i started picking some of these up
and talking with some of the vendors and realized that they were just pieces
of tin with copper spray paint um and they were calling them moscow mule
mugs so again my mind started going i get back
to the hotel room and i tell my dad you know this is it this is my calling
i he knew i was losing passion at the time for the dog industry and so i spent the next
six eight months on the mission to source the best copper in the world
and you know remake the original um copper mug okay
and you know i already i knew how powerful story was in creating a brand
and so i had already inherited this story so it's just all all the stars aligned
for me there and we ended up not going to china because again it was
all just really a bunch of junk over there when it came to copper and we found the best copper was sourced
in india turkey and mexico okay well i eliminated mexico because
the town they were um making all the copper was one of the biggest um cartel
cartel towns yeah you don't want to get involved in that yeah not about to go down there um and then
turkey some other issues so we ended up going with india and it was one of the best things i ever
did um you know and speaking of luck
about three months after we launched the moscow copper company um
two things happened within the first week of launch food and wine magazine published an
article never reached out to me i had no idea that they even did this so i'm not
expecting any traffic to come to the site yet had not started running ads and
i started getting boom boom boom literally order after order every seconds
and i'm i'm actually at digital marketers um traffic and conversion summit at the
time and i run up to my hotel room and like you know race onto the computer to see where the source of the
traffic was find this article and i mean it just it couldn't have been a
better ad yeah because it wasn't an ad it was nice editorial piece at the end it just said
if you want to get your original classic mugs click here so you know then
uh what was it so are you still doing the moscow mule company you know right around the end of
so at black on black friday we closed and i sold a majority stake uh in that
company so i still have partial ownership but um not involved in the day-to-day
any longer so um and what's the website because i'll check it out later i'm curious
yeah it's moscow copper.com and we also controlled the our media
um portion of that business was moscow mule.com so that's obviously the valuable most
valuable domain name in the cocktail space and um
was very lucky last year last year uh towards the end of last year we went
to um a local company here to make gin you know gin and tonic it's very popular
drink in the uk i don't know if it's popular in the states but here yeah fever tree fever tree tonic is really
popular yeah a massive thing and so we went on this experience where you viewed
brood as brew the right word distilled your own gin is probably a better phrase to use and they use these copper
distills and i thought the way they did the whole thing was really clever and i was like i took some photos of the
copper distilled because like you i'm like right i'm going to go to this company and i'm going to say listen i really can i saw i
just want this copper distilled here and i know somebody in the botanical industry so i could create the
botanicals no problem i could get the copper distilled and i could put them together on a website and sell like a gin distill kit
you know you buy it as a gift and then you can buy your botanicals from me no problem i thought this would be a really fun
great idea to do until i went to the copper distilled company and they said well you have to buy the whole range i said i don't want
a whole range just want to buy this one because it was really cool the way it all worked um and they said well no no no you have
to buy the whole one i'm like do you actually have any distributors anywhere in the uk portuguese company um and they're like
no no and i'm like now guys come on seriously think about no it's really funny isn't
it sometimes it just doesn't work out but you have these great ideas so maybe put me in touch with your indian copper
company and i can talk to them about getting them made definitely yeah i'd love to see what uh
what you had in mind there too talk more about that absolutely so let's go through your you've obviously
um set up a lot of companies um and sold them or a bit like me you know
you sort of every couple years you want to do something new and reinvent yourself which is cool um and you've got this sort of eight
step blueprint um you call it so can we go through that what your eight steps are
sure i'm gonna be happy to we'll run through it obviously we can't go through
you know the um the entire thing but i can also um i think my team created a
link for your audience that they can go through um later we've outlined or we we've given
the entire blueprint out so they can go to i believe it's
buildmybrand.xyz forward slash curiosity yes and if you go there i'm going to copy that link
here and i'll put it on the screen you carry on talking jj well yeah so
after the episode you know you can go through and and see the whole thing and we're constantly
updating um that blueprint so you'll actually have access to
a full members area when you go through that and we'll be keeping you updated with any
changes we make to the blueprint as we um update them
but um yeah so phase one is what we like to call the game plan
and that's really where we're coming up with the whatever the niche product idea is
that we're going to build and you know there's there's kind of a big
controversy with this phase one and i'll tell you that
i like big controversy yeah you know i'm sure you've heard this matt
you've got plenty of entrepreneurs that i really respect that will tell you phase one should be
building your raving fans building your audience out before you're coming up with any product
or niche well you're coming up with a niche but just creating say a facebook page
around um outdoors you know or people that like to
hunt or camp and then you build that audience up then figure out later what products they
want sell them the products now i've done it both ways i've done it that way
and i've also done it where i've started phase one with a product idea
yeah and and it just for this purpose we're going to start with phase one being coming up with your
product idea okay because i i think it's a bit easier that way um
and we probably of the time go that route yeah mainly because i'm always i've got
a list in my iphone of probably ideas at this very moment that i've
researched vetted and i know for a fact i could build a
a seven eight-figure business with these ideas but just don't have the time right i'm sure you've got the same
well that's the reason i'm smiling um like you i i'd say to people you've got to start with the product
you've got to have a product that people want to buy first and foremost um and i'm like constantly making notes
on my phone well that looks interesting you go away you do a bit of research and find out oh that's a bit too saturated
i'll i'll put that on the scratch list or that one looks into yeah yeah yeah totally yeah totally totally so anyway just to briefly cover
phase one uh and the research i go through there's a couple tools i'll
i'll use let's say i see a product and it and i'm curious about it i jump on the
computer i'll first check out um heliumthey have a it's an amazon tool
okay and so i'll go on there and ch and i'll just um reverse engineer
everything and i can see how much search volume there is for that product in that niche um
see how many competitors are out there if every competitor on the first page
has over reviews and has been around for years i'm probably going to scratch the idea
granted i also um am a big believer in
building your own brand and not building what people call an amazon business
there really is no such thing as an amazon business you might sell on the amazon platform
but if you're building a business you're creating a brand and you're just using that platform and
i don't like to um you know i look at it like i'm building my tent in somebody else's backyard you know i
want my own land to build my house on um so
first and foremost i will i'm i'm setting out to create a brand that people will know
like and trust and build brand loyalty there yeah but if i can get hundreds of thousands
of dollars a month on amazon in the meantime great yeah then i so you're not doing it at the exclusion of
amazon but you're not doing exclusively amazon exactly yeah exactly and some products
like moscow copper we didn't even really touch amazon
that was couldn't even compete there because people were selling four copper mugs for when we were
selling one for so yeah not the right platform so yeah it all
depends on the business and please stop me if if i need to move quicker just let me know um
so phase one is um you call it the game plan and that's researching your product
um and you do that using helium is that right i'll use helium but if if i want to
um come up with new ideas i'll go on to sites i'll look at amazon best seller list
i'll look at sites like indiegogo and kickstarter yeah that's a big one i mean you can just go
down a rabbit hole for days yeah yeah finding things there so
i was amazed by how many people would come to me and their their problem was having no
idea yeah and because like both of us you know they're a dime a dozen
but um yeah you're right i think it's um i've always been intrigued by people
saying i don't i don't actually know what to sell i want to set up an online business but i don't know what to sell i'm like goodness me
yeah there there is definitely no shortage of ideas and stuff which you can sell
you just need to do the research exactly and a lot of it is they just have no clue that these tools even exist
they see them and they're like you can see how many people are searching this topic each month you can see how
many sales your competitors are making it blows people away more in the space but um
so yeah once you've got your idea you move on to phase two and this is where we come up with a name
for the business okay so you've not named the business until phase two right we get in and i use tools like
name mesh is one of my favorites okay um and lean domain search sometimes
and i'll just i'll write out all the um base keywords you know
and adjectives that describe the product um or the emotions i'm trying to evoke
and and i'll just put them together and i'll look through there and i'll do trademark search of course
make sure i'm not infringing um and then you know it's it's back and
forth with my team shooting names for a couple days we'll let them marinate
and then we'll we'll pick one yeah um and i like to say that a name can make a business
but it's probably not gonna break your business so if you've got a great product and a crappy name
um you know you're probably still gonna do okay yeah but if you got a great name you're
it's probably gonna help you a bit so but if you've got a crap product but a great name yeah there's no right yeah exactly i
appreciate that so then phase three we move on um
this is the very fun legal phase um my favorite and
i don't think so yes yeah important i really am hands-off during this phase
fortunately we've found a great um legal team out here in the st and if any anybody's watching
from the states from california hit me up and i can introduce you to our
team yeah they're fantastic they've got a team of accountants cpas
um great legal all of it covered in under one roof wow so so yeah we
figure out whether or i should say they they tell me whether we're best suited
on this brand to be an llc or an s corp c corp and they get all that stuff
structured again i i know very little when it comes to taxes
and the structure of corporations i think it's good advice though because
i mean you know in the states you have very different company structures to what we have here in the uk
um and i dare say listeners all around the world you you you know your local company structure is going to be different so
how you set that up will be very dependent on the territory that you're in it will be
dependent upon the territories that you want to sell to and the best people to help you with that are going to be a good local legal
team and it's worth having a conversation with them in the early stages because
you don't want to get caught later on down the line that's for sure so exactly yeah yeah
i don't know about you but i've gone down that road with my first business
and playing um ketchup is or you know going backwards
and trying to fix things years down the road is a nightmare nightmare and when you're
trying to sell your company which i was gonna get into later in phase eight which is the exit phase of
your business yeah i'll save that for a few minutes yeah yeah we'll get into that but no definitely get the legals done
right at the start especially if you are entering into an agreement with another company
or if you're entering into an agreement with say a partner or an investor um even if the partner or investor is
your friend at the early stages you know the early stages everybody's still most importantly if they're your friend
yeah yeah yeah because when you want to keep them your friends or when times get tough that's when you
really really need to make sure all that documentation's in place trust me i have been burned oh definitely been
burned by this and i'm sure jj you have as well which is why we're like get it sorted right at the start trust us on this
having been around the block a few times get it fixed from day one because if you're anything like
you know like you or i you just you want to race get off to the races
with your idea and it's all just fun and games in the beginning
like oh yeah you want to be my partner let's do this okay oh wait a minute we're now making a
million dollars every month and we don't have everything in place so
yeah things can get ugly um so moving on to phase four
and once we've got all the legal structure in place the and and also i should mention
sometimes we'll start phase four while phase three is happening behind
the scenes because as long as we know the corporation is just about to um
be finalized we can be getting phase four finding our raving fans going because
the process for doing that is getting the shell of our website built yeah um getting the blog set up
it's having our content team um publishing a few different articles
which we to find those articles that we're going to write we're using again tools like helium
ahrefs um we're finding the keywords
that people are searching for and then writing articles there so that way we're really getting a head start
on our seo strategy so that we can start driving organic
traffic to the site um when it's ready
because you know it's gonna take a month one to three months to go through the
product creation phase and so by the time the product's here and ready to go
we may already have some articles that are starting to rank yes it takes a good it can take three to
six months for your articles to rank it's not always the case but most of the time it's it's a medium strategy isn't it seo
exactly depending on how difficult you know your keywords are it could take six to nine
months um but yeah so phase four there is is finding those
raving fans and just starting to build up an audience um you know you're getting
all your social media accounts set up you're start we're starting to split test
um some funnels so some lead magnets
tripwires um just to bring bring i mean just one second here jj
because um i i know what you mean when you say things like
funnels and lead magnets and and all these sorts of things i just wonder you know if there's people
listening to the show who go what are you talking about when you say funnels and lead magnets there i think
there may be phrases that people have heard but never really understood for sure so let's just let's
just clarify make sense sure that i'll use this example
because something we've started doing recently that i'm more excited than just about
anything for right now is these quiz funnels that we've started
it's a big thing yeah yeah and so i found so anytime i'm trying to learn a new
topic you know everything i'm talking about today i didn't invent or create any of this stuff
i've searched out and found the best of the best in each of these
fields and i've hired them to mentor me and spend you know i spend thousands of dollars on
masterminds to to do this stuff and there's a guy ryan levesque
are you familiar with with ryan yep and so he is the master when it comes to
building quiz funnels he started doing these for com major corporations like proactive skin
care um revolution golf and what they are is they're the quizzes you
you'll see in social media they're marketing quizzes that will say things like
um what is your biggest swing killer you know if it's for the golf swing and
you you go in and you take this five to ten question quiz with the idea of figuring out
what your biggest killer in your golf swing is and then what they do is they're they're
using this as a tripwire lead magnet to get your information and so
they're building thousands and thousands of leads per day doing this and we've started testing them and it's
incredible because you're able to get um leads for pennies on the dollar
instead of spending cents or a dollar for a click on facebook now you're
you know we're getting them for to cents wow um wow that's a massive improvement
oh it is for sure and you're getting people to really engage in your content
um and so what we what we're doing once we've got
their their contact info and now they're on our email list we're providing them
you the the system works like this you attract you prescribe and you diagnose
and so you've got a band-aid and a cure your band-aid is the free solution that
you're giving them you know whether that's it's really just
anything it could be a pdf article a video and your cure is your actual course
you're selling or your product sure and so yeah the trip
does that explain yeah yeah that's good yeah and we've we've covered a topic
we've never actually covered on the show uh which is really cool the quiz funnels so now i appreciate you doing that and
telling us that they're you're having some success with them oh yeah no they're great
um and we're we're starting to implement them with some of our partners now in in
different brands and they're fantastic so on the beauty site
oh you did yeah several years ago actually we came up with this concept where you you filled out this quiz about your skin
and it gave you a prescription and yeah it was super cool see what type of skin you have
yeah what your skin concerns were and then it would recommend products to you and if you want if you give us your address we would send you samples of
those products so you could try them before you bought them and um the conversion rates from that funnel
were or insanely high fantastic yeah the beauty space is a great one for
quiz funnels for sure i mean it works in literally every niche you can think of
um but there's some that work a little better than others so as we have um
back to you know we've we're finding our raving fans yep and now we're
we're moving on to phase five where we begin to create the product and creating
the product there's really four steps there you've got your research phase and
this is where you're you're spending a lot of time looking at competitors um
you're again heliumgreat tool because you can go in and and
it'll sort out all of the reviews instead of reading through one by one you can pick you know say all of the
one star reviews and then it'll actually tell you um the most commonly used phrases in each
of these reviews which is so helpful because you know if you're selling uh
a collagen peptide product let's say you know you go through and it tells you
in my coffee is the most commonly used phrase so now you see that
your customers are primarily buying this product to put in their coffee
so little things like this are going to help you with creating your product and you know
marketing your product um so yeah you're doing your research you're figuring out um what your
what people are saying their biggest pain points or what they don't like about these products
um you you're then moving on to planning which
is where you're finding the right manufacturer and this is very difficult step a lot of
people end up quitting at this point because they're they're just terrified of sending thousands of
dollars off to you know a chinese supplier let's say
fortunate fortunately i have again been doing this for years and so have you
so we've built up great supply chain um you know manufacturers that we can
trust and that's not a problem anymore so
in the beginning though it can be it can be very difficult um but yeah you want to get samples
sent out from i'd recommend at least three different suppliers yeah
you want to you know really negotiate you want to get to a price where
you don't want to fight them too much because you're going to end up pissing them off and they're gonna start
using um subpar materials in your products and
they're not gonna deliver on time and you're gonna get pants customer service and all that sort of stuff right so you don't wanna just
nickel and dime your manufacturer but you want to get a fair price where you're going to be able
to you know stay in business and compete
anyhow then you move on to your prototyping stage where you're again depending on the type
of product you're creating if it's something from completely from scratch where you have an engineer
developing all this you're going to do more prototyping versus if you're just creating a private label
product that you're changing something slightly on you know you might not be doing as much
prototyping then you actually move on to manufacturing
then you move on to phase six and this is where we finish the website so the as i
mentioned and how are we on time we're good yeah we gotta we got a little while yep
okay so once you're once you've got the manufacturing
process going you're now building
you already started your website you've got your blog up you're about your about us page and little bits but
you don't have your product details page and all the filler content so
you're really building that out and it's a perfect time to do it because you're waiting anywhere from again
thirty to ninety days did you take prisoners on your sites we've we do we've started doing that a
lot more recently you know than we did in the beginning um
again i've it's it's a learning process i learn new stuff every day but um
definitely over the last couple of years i've started doing more pre-orders
but that can also bite you because i'll give you an example on a product
from about three three months ago we had everything in place i had already
received perfect prototype samples and manufacturer who i've worked with for
years i'm sorry i've been talking a lot lately losing my voice stay hydrated top tip
especially in the summer jeez so yeah this is a great example because
um the the manufacturer had me believing that
we were gonna be receiving our first batch of inventory in about two weeks and
i had no reason to doubt that i've worked with this manufacturer on other products for years always came through
well this time i find out again i started doing pre-orders and
running ads spending a lot of money uh we we sold through about or
products or or orders had come through and i had i was thinking that the
products were about to be air freighted the next day everything's gonna work um
i get an email from the supplier and he tells me bad news all of the shell casings of the product
were scratched and now thankfully you know if if i was um a new client
you know i've heard of horror stories where they could have just shipped me the units with the scratches
and i would have received them on time but then i would have had a bunch of unhappy customers so
you know long story short we had had to write the customers and tell them look we apologize but um
we're gonna be another couple weeks out and we're gonna send you another unit as a
um way of apologizing right so and that's something else to touch on
not many people will do this because they're like well that's going to cost me more money but if you do run into problems like
this do whatever you can to satisfy that customer yeah whether it's
giving them another product for free just make them happy because it will
pay it'll pay for that tenfold fold yeah these customers will tell their
friends um and especially when you're a new business as well you want them you need them to write the reviews you need all
of that sort of data and information so you've got to treat them right to get that data out of them
it can destroy your business really before you even get started yeah yeah um so you know
and and most people are pretty understanding if you if you're up front with them and you
just communicate they'll be okay with it i mean maybe we had one
customer that and you're always gonna have one or two that you know nothing's gonna
make them happy but the majority of them said oh thank you so much um you know no problem i understand
so yeah that's where were we um
oh yeah the finishing your website out while you're waiting for your product to
finish manufacturing um and then you move on to phase seven
so once your product has arrived you've fully tested the website now back in the
beginning when i didn't have a team this was all me doing this stuff you know testing every
button testing the whole shopping cart process and of course i miss things along the
way and you know you're going to run into so many headaches yeah your videos but it's a crucial step
this whole testing thing is absolutely critical we're making a new site um live tomorrow actually
and we have spent days hours i mean if you add up all the time we've
spent testing it will it will run into weeks because you've got multiple people on your team
doing it the whole team everybody on the team has been testing and testing and continually testing
and even then i know for certain one thing we will have not caught everything but we really caught most things and the
more people you throw at testing the more bugs you catch the more bugs you catch the better your launch experience
is going to be exactly so if you're a solopreneur you've got to
hire your you know just bring on your family friends get them in everybody you can think of
and test on every device as well don't just test it on your computer oh that's that's
the other thing you know test it on your tablet you've got to check firefox safari because you thought you
checked everything and then some customer writes who's using internet explorer you know and you're
just like wow yeah i didn't even know these people still existed but apparently they do and
they're using my site and having issues exactly yep like no how could this be
it's worked on every browser you know every tablet um so yeah there's no way you're gonna
catch everything just like matt said but you can catch the majority of it
so and get people to help you and i don't think uh and i mean i don't want you
what you're thinking here is jj but for me i don't think you have to solve every book so for example if your website doesn't
work on certain versions internet explorer that's fine um but you just need to put a notice up on your
site saying this site has not been optimized for this version of internet explorer please use dot dot dot and explain what
works right because again if it's one person out of a thousand that's using this or coming to the site
you gotta weigh out the cost benefit the cost benefit of it doing it yeah is it gonna cost you two thousand
dollars to have your developer make this change maybe it's not worth it you know for
that one customer a month that's going to come there yeah but as long as you inform them and just say
you know ahead of time listen we notice this is what you're using the is not going to work that well on that browser please use something else and
your developers should do that for you pretty pretty easily i would have thought um
and you know what i've whenever we put that on the site i've never had any issue or complaints from a client going
why are you not supporting my version of internet yeah because they expected they kind of
go oh well you know it's true you're not the only site that said that to me and maybe uh you can even go the extra mile and throw
a little uh tutorial video out there and say and by the way if you'd like to check
out you know the browsers that people are using here's a great
video um it might even help you yeah and there you go create some more goodwill
absolutely always be helpful so so so phase seven then is your you're
you're doing all your testing you've done a shed load of testing here what else is going on yeah so this is
really the launch phase and it encompasses a lot so you're
you're launching and you're growing your brand you know so this phase is
really going on all the way up until you exit the business and so
you know once um after we've launched this is when we start really starting to
test more vigorously we're testing our ads we're we're split testing different
landing pages different copy because
we really just need to start driving as much traffic as we can to see what's working and then we're
eliminating what doesn't work and we're doing more and more of what is working
so you know the other thing is so many new entrepreneurs will get overwhelmed
they think they have to do youtube videos facebook ads google ads all of it right
yeah and don't just just pick one that's always my voice you can pick one
and do it and master it yeah yeah and then once once you've built up a team
and you're at a a point where matter i are at then you can have a
person dedicated to google dedicated to youtube because these are full-time
jobs running these different channels um and and your focus needs to be
specifically growing your brand what you're gonna do to continue keeping your customers happy
and um you know driving more and more traffic to the brand
um that's very true very true i actually haven't um had an interesting conversation uh
jj tell me what you think about this i had an interesting conversation with someone the other day about whether or not i should ditch
instagram right so i'm on instagram there's i don't know maybe followers
somewhere around there it's it's not a massive amount but it's not a small amount you know um and we've got this instagram account
but we we're so focused on doing one or two things well but whilst our instagram you know my
personal instagram account seems to be doing well it's not what i do it's you know i'm i
think my focus needs to be in different locations and the numbers and stuff can be fun and interesting
but actually i've got to follow the same advice i give to everybody else right i've got to focus in and do
one or two things well rather than trying to do everything well um exactly so yeah it's one of those
yep very true um one of the best pieces of pieces of
advice we can give um let's see so at the same time
throughout the launch i'm i'm heavily focused on pr and
i'll typically work on maybe going on a media tour
so you know doing podcasts like this i'm gonna start doing a lot more of this
in the past i had gone on and done a lot of um national tv
yeah and that's kind of going out and podcasts are starting to come in
podcasts you can get on them yeah podcasts youtube stuff like that um
is really the way of the future and where things are going so it was great i've been fortunate to
have been able you know to go on things like fox news and cnbc
and these these national platforms um and international
but i i really think podcasts have been more beneficial over the last year
or two than even any of these big tv shows yeah that's interesting isn't it because usually
what you'll find is there's going to be a handful of podcasting your specific niche and so if you can get on those
their their whole audience is your specific niche where if you get on something like the bbc which is great and i'm not saying don't
get on the bbc or cnbc or fox news or any of these other guys but their their audience is everybody yeah so it's
much more sort of big big picture isn't it whereas the podcasts are much more targeted much
more niches it tends to be what i found exactly uh just another quick example on
that be i was really surprised uh when i was a guest on the eo fire podcast
um oh the john lee uh yeah john lee dumas yeah exactly
within say hours of that podcast going live i had
so many more um applica applications to work with me and my team uh than we ever had when
i went on the mornings with maria which i which what was that a c
cnbc i can't even remember but it was you know a big um it's broadcast
at least across america i don't know maybe worldwide and she's got millions of viewers he has
not close to that but i had probably five times the amount of leads that had come in
yeah so he's going to choose their point actually john uh so if you do get a chance to listen
to it eo eo fi entrepreneurs on fire isn't it um i think that's what the eo stands for
and i quite like his show i've met some really interesting people um through his show now listen to it and i
listen to some of the guests and i go there'd be a really cool guy to get on the show so we approach them and say listen come on to the podcast it's um
yeah oh yeah yeah that's that's another great thing about podcasts is you start going on the circuit and
you have that that happens all the time i've probably had five requests in the last week by
different people you know telling me they're selling me on
how great their podcast is and why i should come on so it's it's a great thing yeah um
so phase seven is the launch and the growth phase and then let's deal with phase eight which you call the
exit phase you mentioned this earlier on when we're talking about the legals but what's what's this all about yeah it's
something i learned after my my first exit and a very hard lesson i learned
um which and most entrepreneurs are never thinking about this we talked
about in the beginning because you're just off to the races thinking about making sales
you're not thinking about you know what's going to happen in two three years when you've got buyers
that want all of your analytics and they want all of your accounting in
perfect order and i had none of this so i had to go back and spend
thousands of dollars hiring proper accountants that which i now have on
staff but um to go back in figure everything out because i was using
two three different bank accounts you know my personal this and that and i'd transfer money
from one to the other you know do not do that take it from me
i made so many of these mistakes and they cost me dearly so
start it right from the scratch yeah i mean yeah from the beginning um and get your
analytics another big big thing if you need help on that i've got a great team internally but i'm
happy to you know they've they've got some extra time so i can help there too but um yeah
something most people don't think about either they'll just set up analytics real quickly but they won't really focus in on
uh their tag manager and getting all the buckets set up properly
but this is what buyers want to see and you've got to believe and expect if you're getting
into business you got to believe that you're going to eventually be at the point where you're
going to sell this business one day so yeah that's the exit phase it's
really just getting your accounting in order from the beginning your analytics and tracking yeah um
and and i'm i have so much add it's crazy and i'm i'm by far
i'm not the the sharpest tool in the shed i can tell you that right now so the
fact that i've been able to go out there and and have four successful
very successful exits in the past five years should tell you something like this
isn't rocket science no you know what you're doing and it's it's it's it's simple but it's not easy right
you've got to get it right and i think michael is it michael gerber that wrote the emf he said it right that you know
your whole purpose in building a business is to sell it um and whether you actually physically
sell it or whether you keep if you keep it you're buying it yourself you're trading your life for that business and
so his whole thing is you know you you need this exit strategy you build your business you build it to
sell it um even if you're buying it yourself and so you've you've got to you've got to position
your business in a way that is going to be attractive to a buyer so yes it's got to have turnover yes it's got to have profit
but you've got to do the proper accounting and you've got to do the proper data analytics and all that sort of stuff so
if someone comes along wants to buy it they can read through that and go yeah that's right for me you've made it easy for them
um and if you're the one buying it if you're keeping it you can read through that data and go yes this is worth
exchanging another year of my life for right um information so when it costs me i
mean on my first exit we're talking about you know uh
between two and three million dollar exit for my first company all right it's not a lot of money but
it's not a little bit of money it's it's a good chunk and i
fell out of escrow twice because of this because i didn't have the stuff in order
and the people didn't want to waste the time or get buried in the um in my mess
going through it all so luckily fortunately i was able to find somebody who could see past all that
and and i spent all that money to get things in as good of order as i could clean it all up but um
yeah just do not do not do that i can't stress that enough um
how do you um how do you find people to buy your business then so you sort of get in two three years
into it you're feeling it's like it's now time to sell what do you have a process for that or is it
just chance encounters how does that work for you well i've got a broker um
a broker that i use i've used for the last couple
sometimes people will reach out directly to you
for instance with the moscow copper company so depending on the niche you're in you know it was a
perfect fit for these big spirit brands like stolie uh who we ended up
partnering with and they were initially very interested in in purchasing the company
so that's also another thing we should touch on when creating your brand from the very
beginning a lot of times you know it can be very helpful to actually think that through
before starting if you're deciding between two products to start and one of them you can see a clear exit
strategy with a perfect buyer that um you know sometimes i'll i'll start a
business just because i know who i want to sell it to right um so i think that's an interesting idea
yeah yeah yeah and and then you will ultimately um if you build a good enough
brand people will start reaching out to you and and that's when you know you've done
something right that's right people against each other
it's really fascinating how you say that because i did have there's a few about months ago and and
conversations have stopped a little bit because of kobe but it was fascinating how they approached me to buy one of my online businesses um
and they said listen we are investors we're cash cash rich investors uh we'll buy this um they wanted to buy
this brand and they said you know we can amalgamate that and we can get on and run that that's great but could we make an agreement with you
that you would set up a business and in months time we would buy it so they were they were like wanting to
buy a business that i've not yet started yeah yeah they were like you seem to have a good track record of being able to stop
businesses um online businesses so we're happy to partner with you in the sense
so they're buying you yeah in effect yeah it's like sure we can you know i'll set this business up and
you can buy it and we'll agree the terms ahead of time so i know what it's going to look like you know what it's going to look like and i know what i'm building
and why i'm building and i have a clear exit strategy it was absolutely fascinating absolutely fascinating
that's amazing yeah thank you and that reminds me now of these these new platforms that are popping up
oh what's the name there's this one i was blown away by recently that
the whole platform is um it's like a stock exchange
but for entrepreneurs for people so you're buying future value of this person
and this person's time wow that's the clever idea and their shares are going up and down
um yeah based on the volume so you can buy say hours where this
guy is he's just out of college maybe he's only at dollars an hour
and i've watched over the last couple weeks as even as some people went from thirty dollars an hour up to two and
three hundred dollars an hour um it's a crazy concept isn't it
yeah you'll have to send me that i'd love to have a look at that and see what's going on that sounds like i will i'll find it i can't remember the
name off top of my head but um i've got it through to me and if if we can we'll put
it in the show notes if people want to check that out awesome so let me um
so we've gone through these eight phases right uh and i appreciate you taking the time to sort of go through them and to
explain them and i found the whole thing fascinating how you do it and the sort of the similarities that i go through um jj
just listening to you talk um i'm like yeah we do that yeah we do that i wouldn't have put that that way but that's quite clever
um so really really enjoyed the conversation so thank you so much for doing that yeah i know it's
great i know it's been great if people want to get a hold of you um what's the best way
to do that how do people connect with you well you know we never got much into it
but i'm really starting over from scratch essentially at this point because
after my most recent exit you know of moscow copper i decided to go in and launch this
buildmybrand.xyz and that's our incubator but um
so we're now working with other new entrepreneurs who are looking to build their brands and best way to reach me would be either
jj jjresnick.com i look at and and will reply to all of my
emails directly um or the buildmybrand.xyz
website you know and you can apply there also to work with us
um yeah because that's something i've seen a few people do this um where
people who have uh an entrepreneurial drive or an idea but don't necessarily know fully what
they're doing they can go to that website and in fact we've put it on the screen now buildmybrand.xyz
and you can use the link forward slash curiosity if you like you don't have to it's no problem um and have a look at what you guys do
because they you do work with entrepreneurs don't you and help them go through these phases it's the process
that you take people through your team commanding you help them build their business
exactly and it's been so exciting i mean just in the last few months um timing
was crazy because we launched this just before covet hit
and it's good time to launch it to be fair oh yeah because everybody in a you know our target
market we're looking for is that corporate nine to five person
who wants to get out of the rat race and do their own thing and that's a lot of people right now
so yeah we take them under our wing we invest in them um i mentor them directly
and build up brands and so we're doing everything right now um everything from a uv
sanitizing all the way to um working with doctors
uh one of them is a revolutionary at home allergy test super exciting stuff but and everything
in between so we're uh you know it's fun i'm really relaunching um starting over from
scratch but at this point it's like i can do it in my sleep almost i know isn't it yeah i've done it and don't you
find working with other entrepreneurs um we've just launched for example a website this week
with a lady called um joe jewett uh interestingly also has jj as her initials uh but joe jewett um who
is a lovely lady she was the makeup artist for princess diana and bette midler you know bravo
streisand she's really uh got some great clients under her belt
so we've just launched a project with her don't you find it's just such good fun working
with other entrepreneurs that are hungry that have a skill set that you don't have and but you can
bring what you do and really help sort of magnify that and together
i mean look that's what brought us together and you mentioned it in the beginning our initial conversation
that was supposed to be minutes i think we talked for an hour and a half that time and and that's that was the
reason because we both have different skill sets and you know you would say something
that would trigger me and we were just feeding off each other back and forth and now that's what i get
to do all day long and what my favorite thing to do and what i'm best at
is building the brand and launching it and what i don't enjoy is the continuous
op day-to-day operations you know so now i find those people that want to be
a ceo and have this successful business give it to them and i get them off to the races so it's
it's a win-win for both and i get to spend my days working with all these new entrepreneurs so it's just as amazing
so much fun love it listen jj i appreciate you being with us on the
show thanks for taking the time to be here and thanks for sharing in great detail your process um i'm sure folks have got a lot out of
it i know i certainly have got a lot of notes um and if people want to reach out and
connect with you they can do and the link for jj's website is on the screen if you're watching on facebook
buildmybrand.xyz if you're english or xyz if you are not and check out jj's
website do get in touch with him and as i said we will put a link to jj's site and the notes and everything from
tonight's show on the uh on the show notes which you can also find at matt edmondson.com
jj thanks for being with us thanks for taking the time to be here really really appreciate you being with
us uh i hope this is all good for you with your um with your new child that is
approaching very very quickly yeah might be coming today you never know
no problem thanks for being on the show jojo much appreciated see ya okay wasn't that fantastic with
jj didn't he just go through everything with a fine tooth comb this is going to be the kind of episode
where you are going to want to go back and you're going to want to listen to it again and we
understand that totally so you can watch it again we'll put the video on youtube
it will also be on facebook and you can uh listen to it again through the audio
podcast system no problem as i said uh we will put the notes from tonight's episode
uh on the website megaminster.com just head on over to there and dig out the episode with jj and
you'll find all the show notes all the links to the videos and the audio because i know you're going to want to check it out again
it was so so rich that's for sure and it can be something
as simple as a tactic like jj was talking about quiz funnels and you maybe go oh that sounds interesting
uh how he's using quiz funnels and sort of you know halved his facebook ads cost um
so i'm gonna go check that out or you might think actually i like this idea of building for an exit you know building my business for an
extra exit strategy i want to find out more about that do get in touch with jj i'm sure i'd be happy to talk to you about it
and his thinking behind it as well so um all that's left for me to say is thank
you for tuning in to the show thanks for watching thanks for being a part of the community thanks for being one of my fellow
e-commercer we call you an e-commercer i just like this word we're an e-commercer um and uh we hope you got a lot out of
the show hope you enjoyed jj do stay connected make sure you subscribe wherever you get your content
because we are going to carry on interviewing more fantastic folks like jj in the show we've got some great guests
coming up you are not going to want to miss any of it so make sure you subscribe to the podcast
wherever you get your podcast from and make sure like i said you connect with us on facebook
so you can also watch the lives thanks so much for watching uh that's everything from me so uh
goodbye for now have a great day have a great evening wherever you are
and we will see you again very very soon so bye for now you've been listening to the
e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
tips and tools for building your business [Music]
online