#771 – Millions on Amazon, Shopify, & TikTok Shop

What happens when the biggest opportunity for your business requires letting go of another? In this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley Sutton sits down with Ryan Maya, founder of Beyond Braid and Professor Pickleball, to explore his journey from college dropshipping experiments to building multimillion-dollar ecommerce brands. Ryan explains how his lifelong interest in fishing helped him create marketing that connected with customers after roughly a dozen other stores failed. That foundation eventually became Beyond Braid, which generated $9.1 million last year and is targeting more than $10 million this year across Amazon, Shopify, and TikTok Shop.

Ryan breaks down how each channel supports the business, with Amazon now accounting for the largest share of revenue. He also shares a candid perspective on TikTok Shop, where advertising costs, affiliate commissions, and fulfillment expenses make profitability challenging. For his business, breaking even can still provide value when it generates millions of product impressions and encourages shoppers to discover the brand elsewhere. Rather than relying exclusively on affiliates, Ryan creates founder content himself, including videos he says have attracted millions of views. He explains why he became an affiliate for his own brands and how he is testing a shift from mass sampling toward deeper investments in proven creators.

The conversation also explores how Ryan is using AI to reduce production work and improve efficiency. He describes a Claude Code workflow designed to edit short-form videos, write captions, schedule posts, and tag products after he records the footage. Beyond content, his team is exploring AI applications for email marketing, advertising, and graphic design. Ryan also explains why strong branding matters in established categories, how personal relationships help retain productive affiliates, and why a Shopify business needs optimized landing pages, email flows, and a coordinated marketing strategy.

With a majority-stake sale of Professor Pickleball in progress, Ryan plans to concentrate on Beyond Braid’s next chapter. His priorities include expanding the product catalog, exploring international markets, and using a dashboard that tracks profitability by product and channel to guide advertising decisions. His story offers a practical reminder for ecommerce sellers: more activity does not automatically create a stronger business. Understand your customers, know your numbers, and give your best opportunity the focus it needs to grow.

In episode 771 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Ryan discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 01:20 – From College Baseball to Dropshipping
• 05:00 – Turning Fishing Knowledge Into a Brand
• 06:02 – Growing Beyond Shopify With Amazon FBA
• 08:30 – Building and Selling Professor Pickleball
• 11:11 – TikTok Shop Profitability and Brand Exposure
• 14:19 – What Selling on Shopify Requires
• 15:57 – Founder Videos and Affiliate Sampling Strategies
• 20:24 – Becoming an Affiliate for Your Own Brand
• 22:13 – AI Video Workflows and Helium 10 Tools
• 24:43 – Creator Relationships and Branding That Connects
• 29:12 – Email Marketing, AI, and Future Growth

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we talk to somebody who has sold millions of dollars online, TikTok shop, Shopify, Amazon, about to have his own very lucrative exit on one of his brands. He’s gonna talk about all of his unique strategies such as even being an affiliate for his own brand. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers at any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller coming to us from Florida. Are you still in Florida or where are you at?

Ryan:

Yeah, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Bradley Sutton:

Fort Lauderdale, Florida here. A special SM7B microphone guy here. We got both the same microphone, I like it. Ryan is not a unfamiliar face. He’s been on our scale stories before, and he’s come on our AM, PM podcasts to give trainings about TikTok. But I wanted to bring him on for kind of like a different angle, which is just to know about his whole backstory and learn about the multiple brands that he’s running on Amazon, a TikTok shop, and other places. So Ryan, let’s start it off with you’re in Fort Lauderdale now. Is that where you were born and raised or?

Ryan:

Born and raised Miami, so 30 minutes from Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale is basically Miami, just a little bit more chill, a little bit less expensive, but still getting crazy expensive. But yeah, born and raised in South Florida, outdoors, water, sports. That’s kind of been my whole life.

Bradley Sutton:

You go to college out that way?

Ryan:

I went to college here in Davie, which is like 30 minutes west of Fort Lauderdale. I played baseball there for four years.

Bradley Sutton:

Was the school named Davie?

Ryan:

No, Davie is the city. The school is called Nova Southeastern University. It’s a division two. We won national championship in 2015, which was my freshman year. So go Sharks.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Anybody you play with end up in the big leagues?

Ryan:

Yes, actually. A few of my friends from high school. I think there’s still a couple buddies from my team that are still in like triple A.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice.

Ryan:

J.D. Martinez. Did J.D. Martinez play for the Dodgers? I think he played for the Dodgers one year, went to Nova.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah.

Ryan:

I actually played pickleball with J.D. Martinez every once in a while. So he lives in Fort Lauderdale. So yeah, there’s some friends that are up and down in the big leagues. Baseball is so hard.

Bradley Sutton:

What position did you play?

Ryan:

High school, I was an outfielder, but I went to college as a pitcher.

Bradley Sutton:

Ah, little Shohei Ohtani here, the two-way player.

Ryan:

I don’t know about that, bro. Long way from Ohtani.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, baseball is a sore topic for me now because my Dodgers couldn’t three-peat, but everybody hates the Dodgers. Hey, we won two in a row. So not many teams can do that. So I’m fine.

Ryan:

You got enough already.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. What did you major in there while you were playing baseball?

Ryan:

Marketing and entrepreneurship, which if you ask me is…

Bradley Sutton:

Entrepreneurship? They actually had an entrepreneurship major?

Ryan:

Dude, it’s such BS. So I started my dropshipping journey in college. My first dropshipping business, Shopify dropshipping business, was my freshman year of college. It was actually this business, this fishing business. That was the first dropshipping store I ever started, freshman year of college. It didn’t work at first. I tried 12 other stores. And then my junior year, I went away to play summer baseball. So in college, they send you away to different towns to go get better, train, whatever. So I went to Boonville, New York, which was like population 4,000. Literally, it was called Boonville.

Bradley Sutton:

Sounds like it.

Ryan:

No, it’s literally called Boonville. And there I had so much free time. We had one game a day, which was at 6pm. So you had the whole day to just do whatever. And I’m literally living in the middle of nowhere. So I worked out, I trained, and I had the whole day. So I was literally on webinars, YouTubes, just trying to figure out this Ecommerce thing. And I really figured out the whole secret to success for dropshipping was Facebook ads and learning how to do good marketing. And I basically tried one kind of ad that… I started finally getting conversions and sales. Then I later tried a few video ads. And that’s basically what led one thing to another, which basically started Beyond Braid, the brand I have today, was all from learning marketing and dropshipping, which was the foundation of how to start my brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Where were you dropshipping from?

Ryan:

It was all dropshipping from China. So overseas products. The first product I really had success with was Fishing Line. And that’s my hero product today. So I eventually just learned the nuances of this market, which we can get into later of why this worked for this product. But yeah, that’s like… And that was in 2016. So that was literally 10 years ago. So I’ve been selling Fishing Line online for 10 years. It’s crazy.

Bradley Sutton:

Was that something you were passionate about or just randomly found it or what?

Ryan:

Yeah. So prior to that, I had been fishing my whole life. So I have 2 older brothers. My dad has fished since he was a little kid. So fishing has been in my family. I grew up fishing and I love fishing. So when I had mentioned I tried 12 other stores, I tried random things like makeup stuff, like college bar equipment, college flags, things I didn’t know about. But I knew about fishing. And that’s what translated into the marketing was I knew how to speak the language of a fisherman. And in our industry, it’s like, if you don’t speak the same language as the customer, you immediately get flagged as an imposter. So I think that’s what really helped our marketing was like, I was a fisherman. So I knew how to speak the language and appeal to these fishermen and actually sell to them.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. I like it. So when did you consciously decide to go to Amazon? What triggered that? If you finally got your dropshipping working well, how did you get to that next phase where like, hey, I need to actually do private label and just own my own brand instead of just dropshipping?

Ryan:

So I’ll keep the long story short, but I graduated college, dropshipping business was doing really well. I went to go get a job working for Grant Cardone in real estate, nothing to do with what I was doing. I sold the dropshipping business, ended up getting 51% of the dropshipping business back, started what was now the brand Beyond Braid because I realized you can’t dropship forever. It’s not scalable. It’s not sustainable. You have to build a real brand. You have to have inventory in the States. So, I turned on… Once I got the brand back, we started the brand. This is like a six-month process. We sold on Shopify. I think it was for six to eight months. We were on a seven-figure run rate. And people were like, you should check out this Amazon thing. It’s really, really cool. So I had no prior knowledge of Amazon before even starting this business because I was a Shopify first brand. Then I got on Amazon, hired my first agency, had no idea what PPC was. Back in the day, it was just literally one hero product with a bunch of SKUs. So our main fishing line listing has 350 SKUs at this point, but it’s really one parent listing. So yeah, I set up… I found an agency, this random agency. They helped me set up my PPC. The agency was like, hey, if you really want to make this Amazon work, this Amazon thing work, you have to send in units to FBA because that’s the only way you’re really going to convert. So we started sending in 10% of our SKUs, then 15% of our SKUs. And it’s just grown ever since to where now… Again, Shopify was our main channel. Amazon was this small thing. Now Amazon makes up for probably 55% to 60% of our total revenue. Shopify is about 25% to 30%. And TikTok shop is about 15% to 20%.

Bradley Sutton:

So what year was your first full year, calendar year selling on Amazon?

Ryan:

Probably 2021 or full year was probably 2021 or 2022, somewhere around there. So not too long ago.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And how much do you grow sales? It was just the one brand in those days?

Ryan:

It was just the one brand in those days. I can’t tell. I mean, the trajectory of the brand started off… The first year was like 800 grand. Then I think we went to like 1.5, then 2.4, then 3.2, 3.4, 6.4. Last year was 9.1. And this year we should be a little over 10 total. That’s total sales. So wherever Amazon falls in that, I have no idea.

Bradley Sutton:

At what point did your other brand come on? Like, was it during COVID years? So it was like early on in your Amazon journey? It wasn’t like you were selling only fishing lines for years and years, but it sounds like maybe within a couple of years, you already started this other brand?

Ryan:

Yeah. So as I mentioned previously, I had a partner in the fishing brand who really wasn’t doing much. And that was kind of the original agreement we made, but we had no idea that the fishing brand was going to get that big. I had tried to buy them out. We couldn’t see eye to eye. So essentially, I started the Pickleball brand because of that. I had some extra time and money. And it was just perfect timing. This was like as COVID was happening, Pickleball was blowing up.

So I saw the opportunity, started the Pickleball brand, had one really good marketing idea. I basically saw the landscape of where Pickleball was at. All the paddles were super expensive for carbon fiber paddles. And I saw what we could source them for. We could sell them. And everything was selling for $200, $250. And I saw that I can sell this for $99. That was the sole reason I started the Pickleball brand. And that crushed. That offer crushed for the first couple of years. First year, I think we did just under a million. Second year, we did about 2.2 million. And this is 2023, 2024. And where we’re at now with that is Pickleball has slowed down. The fishing brand has continued to grow.

Ryan:

And I’ve realized, and this might be a lesson for someone out there running multiple brands, you really can only focus on one company at a time. Unless you have a CEO or a president or someone else really running the actual other business that you are not running, that business is not going to really grow or prosper. And I recently just realized that. It’s time to move on and really focus on Beyond Braid. Because I think Beyond Braid can be a $50, $75, $100 million company if we really put our foot down. So yeah, I’m selling majority share. I’ll still have a piece of the Pickleball brand. But yeah, just excited to continue focusing on the fishing brand and really grow that brand.

Bradley Sutton:

How did you start the process of looking for somebody to sell the brand to?

Ryan:

So I previously sold the fishing company a long time ago. I think it was on Flippa or Empire Flippers, right? One of those websites. This time around, I just kept it within my network. Over the years, I’ve met just people in the Pickleball industry, other people, manufacturers, people buying Pickleball brands. I found the buyer just within my network, which was pretty nice. We literally just finalized the terms we want to agree with yesterday. So this is all happening real time. Now we’re just putting together the term sheet and all that stuff. Yeah, it’s all happening literally real time.

Bradley Sutton:

Now talk a little bit about how you discovered the TikTok shop opportunity and decided to go there. Did you start the Pickleball brand simultaneously on both? And then at the same time, you started Beyond Braid there. Talk about that journey, how it started and some of the wins and losses in the early part.

Ryan:

Yeah, TikTok shop is interesting. So we were one of the first brands on TikTok shop when they launched, both fishing and Pickleball. So I think it was right after I launched the Pickleball brand, TikTok shop had just came out. So I got both of them on there. Very skeptical. I was like, what is this new thing? But I’m always open to trying new things, especially in the marketing realm. And the early days of TikTok were crazy, where you would take literally this water bottle. I will record a five second video saying, check out this cool water bottle. And it would get a million views. And that would just happen over and over and over for both brands where we’re like, dude, what’s happening? So TikTok from where it first started to where it is now is completely different.

Bradley Sutton:

Has your sales gone down then on that channel?

Ryan:

I don’t know year over year sales. If I had to say, we’re probably flat, if not slightly declining. However, being profitable has been a real issue. And for those who don’t know, who don’t sell on TikTok shop, there’s platform fees just like Amazon. There’s affiliate commissions you have to pay. There’s fulfillment fees, obviously, whether you ship yourself or FBT fulfillment by TikTok. There’s advertising, which has gotten really expensive on the platform. So all that being said, we’ve adjusted our internal calculations where we used to want to be call it a standard across businesses. You typically want to have 20% net margins on your products. With TikTok, we’ve now adjusted that to be between 5% and 10%. And if we’re breaking even, we’re happy. The reason is you definitely get the halo effect from TikTok shop, which means… I think we did a calculation for last month. I think we got something like 7 million product impressions. And we essentially broke even on the platform. And I think we spent a total of $30,000 in ads.

Ryan:

So if you’re telling me I got to spend $30,000 to basically break even and get 7 million product impressions, generally, that’s a win. Because people are seeing your product. They’re discovering your brand. They’re probably going to go to Amazon. They’re probably going to go to your website and buy. Where it gets dangerous is some of these brands who are actively losing money. I know some brands and some friends who are losing $50,000, $75,000 a month between samples and GMB Max ad spend. At that point, you have to say, is this really worth continuing to do in the long term? So the way I look at TikTok shop is if you can run it profitably, amazing. If you can run it at scale and somewhat break even, but you’re still getting millions and millions of product impressions and product discovery, I would consider that also a win. Because naturally, you’ll probably see some growth on the other channels.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Are both your brands also on Shopify?

Ryan:

Both are. Yep yep.

Bradley Sutton:

Talk a little about Shopify. This is actually something that Helium 10 is getting into.

Ryan:

Yeah. Cool.

Bradley Sutton:

And something that’s new to me. So I like learning about it too. Is it kind of like the same as when you’re dropshipping? The key aspect of this is your Meta ad strategy and or Google ad strategy.

Ryan:

So Shopify in general, right? Shopify is your website. In general, yes. But if you’re gonna dip your toe into Shopify and start spending on Meta ads, there’s a whole other realm of things you have to set up, like email marketing, SMS marketing, Google, Facebook, your social media. There’s like… It’s a whole other beast that you really got to wrap your head around. But I think it’s completely necessary. If you’re gonna build a brand in 2026, 2027, you have to be omni-channel. You have to be able to sell in all places. And for the most part, yes. Google and Facebook ads is where we’re spending the most money. I never used to spend money on Google for the longest time. Until this year, we basically revamped our media buying team. And Google became a big strategy where it’s actually working really well, which is surprising because I don’t really Google things anymore. I just look things up in Claude or ChatGPT. So it’s interesting there. But yeah, if you’re gonna run Facebook ads and have them truly be effective, the website has to be optimized. Your landing pages has to be optimized. You have to have email marketing and abandoned cart flow set up. So there’s a whole other beast to just saying, Hey, I want to get on Shopify, if that makes sense.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay, cool. What would you say is the breakdown now of how much… Are you still every week sending out free samples to creators to get new action going? Are you just utilizing a core set of creators?

Ryan:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

How much do you think comes from you yourself, being the face of your brand, making videos? What’s that breakdown like these days?

Ryan:

Yeah. So it’s interesting. For those just hearing about this, I am an affiliate for my own brand. So I have my own page, Ryan Maya. And then we have our main page, Beyond Braid, Professor Pickleball. And through my own pages, I make content that obviously I tag our products. So when Bradley said, Hey, I make a lot of the content, I both do it on our brand page, not so much on our brand page, but through my affiliate account. And through recent discovery, my ads that I record, still for some reason, perform the best for the most part. We do use affiliates. So we have an affiliate group on WhatsApp of about 300 creators, and then a VIP group of about 21 creators, which are the top performers. But what we’ve realized is the mass sampling days of sending out 1,000 units per month, it’s not really working anymore. And that’s not just me. That’s hearing… I have a bunch of friends on TikTok shop, multiple seven-figure and eight-figure brands. They’re seeing the same thing where it’s like… We call it the spray and pray. You send out 1,000 samples, and hopefully you get five videos that actually perform. It’s working less and less these days.

Ryan:

So literally, I think a couple weeks ago, I told my marketing manager, Brandon, I was like, pre-Black Friday, let’s send out $7,000 worth of samples, just a random number. And then a week later, I heard all this information and lined up the dots. And I was like, what if we take that same $7,000, spend $3,500 on samples, and then $3,500 on retainers with some of our best creators, which we know historically have made really good videos. So I think where it’s moving to is finding your core creators who have shown historical success with your products, and just getting those guys to make more videos. I’d rather send those guys more free product and pay them a flat fee per video, rather than sending out an additional 500 samples to random people that they’re going to probably post one time, and it’s going to perform poorly. So that’s one of the things we’re testing. I haven’t fully vetted that theory yet, but that’s I think where it’s going.

Bradley Sutton:

What advice would you give to a newer brand? They don’t have the four-year history of knowing who has been performing. Like, all right, maybe the full spray and pray might not work, but maybe a modified spray and pray to just get started so that you can build that core set of VIP creators.

Ryan:

Yeah, and again, that’s my advice as a mature brand on the platform for a few years. If you’re just getting started on TikTok Shop, there’s really only a couple, there’s only really two things you can do. And those two things are, you better learn how to create content yourself, have a team member or a social media manager who can create content and post from your brand pages, and or, I suggest doing both, send out samples and get affiliates. Like, if you’re not making any… Because I have friends who don’t make any content, and their only hope is to send out samples. Like you have to. That’s literally the only way you’re going to make this platform work because it is an entertainment and content platform first. So video by far is the most important thing here. And those who don’t make content, I’m like, I question why people are afraid to get on camera. And I’m just like, if you want to make TikTok Shop work, for the most part, you got to get over that fear and just start making videos. I don’t care if you sell makeup and you’re a 70-year-old man. Like you could say, you could do the founder story, say, hey guys, I’m the founder of this brand.

Ryan:

This is why I created this product and make a bunch of stuff like that. That’s what I’ve done for my brand. And those videos have worked really well, the founder content. Most of them are not even phishing related. It’s just like saying, hey, I’m the founder of Beyond Braid. Here is our product on the TikTok Shop. I put some extra discounts for you. And those few videos have like 5, 10, 15 million views in our best performing videos. So in the beginning, if you are a new brand, you’re going to have to send out samples. But I would highly suggest coming up with a content strategy where you guys are actively posting content as well.

Bradley Sutton:

Would you suggest to everybody to do what you’re doing as far as putting videos on your brand, but then also having like a separate account where you’re just like a creator? Do you think that’s just something unique that has worked for you? Or it’s like you would give advice for people to test that strategy as well?

Ryan:

So this is my hunch. I think TikTok favors affiliate accounts over brand accounts. And there’s a couple reasons why. I actually got that strategy way back in the day. There’s the oral care brand called Guru Nanda. I don’t even know if they exist. I’m sure they still exist. But they had a huge rip in the beginning, did like zero to 50 mil in like a year. And the founder of that brand was this older Indian dentist. And he was posting a lot through his personal page. So I rarely saw the Guru Nanda page come up. I always saw his page come up. So I was like, there’s got to be a reason why that’s working. And I took that out of his playbook and did that. And on the back end, what people don’t see is creators. As you grow your GMB as a creator, you unlock different levels. So there’s like gold star creator, silver, platinum, gold, emerald, diamond. And as you unlock those tiers, you get more perks. Like you get extra video views, you get extra exposure, quote unquote, from TikTok. So I think that’s helped. And that could be a little cheat code or a little unlock. But that’s coming from me, that we make a lot of content. So this is just kind of like my overflow that goes into my account. If you’re in that position where you have overflow of content, then yes, I would suggest trying this affiliate strategy. But if you can barely post one or two videos a week, then it probably makes more sense to just do it from your brand account.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Um, we were just offline talking about how you guys have been, your use of AI has exponentially increased over the last months. What are some of the biggest unlocks for you guys, for AI, for your brand on how you manage your brands?

Ryan:

Perfect transition, which right on the TikTok shop topic. So my marketing manager and myself really honed in on like a video editing setup. So we use claude code. We have a pretty advanced cloud code setup that actually paid my friends to help us get set up. Long story short, pre-Black Friday for TikTok shop, I wanted to just sit down and record for an hour, as many ads as I can. And I had an editor who previously edited for like $15 to $20 per short form video. Cut it, add captions, B-roll, etc. I took two hours in an afternoon, three to four hours really, and just worked with my cloud code agent and said, I want to be able to sit down, record. I need you to edit it exactly how I want it to be edited. I need you to schedule the post, tag the product, write a caption. So all that being said is I figured out a system to essentially do all that where I just have to show up to the camera and record. And then the rest of the stuff is taken care of. It’s edited, it’s posted, it’s gone into the system. So in theory, that alone saved me like $1,500 in editing fees for the next couple of weeks where I just want to sit down and film. Nice, nice.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ve been using Helium 10 for years. What have been your favorite tools and use cases for Helium 10?

Ryan:

At this point, where I’m using Helium 10 the most is when I’m just looking on Amazon and I’m just looking at competitors, literally on amazon.com, and I’m looking through categories and I see my competitors, just seeing the units and revenue sold for the last 30, 60, 90 days. Sam on my team, who you met earlier, he’s the one really in the weeds using the tools in terms of finding what keywords we’re ranking for, managing PPC in that aspect. So he could probably speak to that much better than I am. But to this day, that is my favorite Helium 10 feature. It’s just a Chrome extension. And every time you just go on an Amazon listing, my own or a competitor, you can just directly see how much revenue they’re doing and how many units are selling, which really helps us gauge where we’re at in the category.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. Going back to TikTok, I wanted to talk about your VIP and your special groups. Obviously, you have these WhatsApp groups. But what are you doing? Does everybody get retainers? Do you ask about their dogs? Get on that personal level? Scheduling real-life meetups? How do you nurture and really make sure that you have a good relationship with your top creators?

Ryan:

Very tough to do. The main chat is definitely less active than the VIP chat. The thing about WhatsApp is you can basically see everyone’s phone number. So some of these people will call and text me directly or my marketing manager directly. And those people who you establish a one-on-one connection with, you know their name, you know who they are. We’ve met some of them in person. Those are the ones who will really go to bat for you because you treat them like humans. One person would be in a big group and you’re just another number. But when you can actively reach out to people, give them special deals, just show them some love, that is where you take this affiliate army thing to the next level. But it is worth it because these people are essentially extensions of your team because they’re going to bat. They’re using their time to create content for you. And at the same time, if they do well, they will be compensated super well through commissions. I think I told you this, Bradley, a long time ago. We had a creator who had 5,000 followers a couple of Black Fridays ago, made one silly video, ended up going viral, did $80,000 in sales in one weekend. He made $10,000 or $12,000 in commission. At the end of the day, we looked at the numbers. He made more than us as a brand, as an affiliate, than we made as the brand. Because with all the TikTok fees, his commission was locked. He was getting, I think it was 12% or 15% no matter what. So yeah, these creators are an extension of your team. So you have to treat them well. But it does take time and it takes a lot of effort to do it properly.

Bradley Sutton:

What are some unique strategies? Could be Shopify, could be TikTok, could be Amazon. To have two successful brands, you’re not just doing cookie cutter things. You’ve mentioned some of your unique things you’re doing, like being your own affiliate and how you manage your influencers. But anything special you think, could be product development, could be how you manage your supply chain. What has allowed you to be so successful online?

Ryan:

You say those words like product development, supply chain, and my mind always goes back to marketing and branding. At the end of the day, the products we’re selling, like Fishing Line, our Fishing Line product, I was having this conversation with a customer actually. The core of our product, you really can’t do anything super innovative in terms of the technology of the product. It’s called polyethylene fiber. Basically, it’s just string, essentially. There’s ways you can color it. There’s ways you can do certain things. But at the core of the product, there’s not much you can do. And that product represents, I think, 70-ish percent of our sales. What we’ve done really well is we’ve branded the product really well. We’ve created really clean packaging, bright packaging, attractive colors. We’ve done some different colors and things that some other of these companies haven’t done. But we’re in an industry where some of these companies that have been around since the early 1900s, literally, those are our main competitors. None of them are on social media. None of them are on TikTok shop. So by looking at a very old industry and coming in with fresh, young, fun ideas… The fishing industry is very serious. It’s like all these serious guys doing serious fishing.

We’re coming in. It’s like fishing is supposed to be fun. Have fun with the product, the product names.

We just launched a pink color fishing line. Instead of calling it pink, we called it Pink Punisher. Just by adding those little details gets people really excited.

So yeah, I would say our secret sauce is just marketing, branding, making it fun, using social media. We have, I think, combined like 400,000 followers on social media for the brand, which is rare these days for a fishing brand. So it’s just marketing and social media, learning how to use video and content, learning how to build an audience around your product, get people hyped up to want to buy your product and be involved with your brand.

Bradley Sutton:

You mentioned email strategy. Are you guys doing newsletter? Or is it just like telling people about new product launches?

What is your email strategy? So what do you guys use email for?

Ryan:

Primarily, email is for promotions, discount codes, new product launches. More rare is like the valuable information content. Where I look at email is you can look at it in two ways.

When I first started email marketing, I had no idea what I was doing. I messed around with myself, just building some emails. I think the first one I ever sent was like a Black Friday one a couple of years into the brand, and it crushed.

We made like 10 grand. I was like, from one email, this is crazy. After trying to build that out, I realized I started spamming the email list and had no idea what I was doing.

So naturally, I went and hired someone who knew what they were doing. We’re at the point where we’re reevaluating email marketing and saying, can we replace… I mean, this kind of sucks to say online.

Hopefully, he doesn’t see this. But can we replace our email marketing guy with AI, with Claude, with our setup? And the more we’re using Claude and seeing its capabilities, it has the potential.

I think people sometimes get butthurt of saying AI is going to replace all jobs. I think the way I look at AI is if you can put a human in charge and empower them with really powerful AI tools, that’s how you create a really powerful and efficient company. And we’re looking at parts of email marketing, PPC, graphic design with that same mindset.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So looking to the future now, once this semi-exit is complete, you mentioned that you think that Beyond Braid has a lot more potential, especially if you’re going to be able to give it your full attention, which is what you’re going to be able to do. So what are your next steps with trying to unlock this potential you haven’t had the bandwidth to do because of the other brand?

Ryan:

So there’s a few areas of the business we’re looking at. One is just getting more aggressive slash more efficient with our marketing, saying how much can we truly spend while being aggressive and maintaining our profit thresholds. In the past, we haven’t had access to as much data as we have access to now. So we built an internal profit dashboard that tells us profitability by product per channel. So just knowing your numbers and saying how much can we actually spend, whether it’s on PPC, Meta, TikTok Shop, and really push it with our current product line, that’s been a big unlock. And we’ve seen some growth from that this year. Number two is product development. So you have to expand the product catalog. I look at Amazon, you look at phishing, and then there’s probably 10 subcategories. I want to have 3, 4, 5 of the top 10 products in each one of those subcategories. So we just need to launch more products and launch more good products. And then three is probably international expansion. So right now, we’re only in the US. Probably looking at the new Amazon UI has this international suggestions map. And they said, we can pick up an extra 6 million if we go to Germany. So who knows if that’s true. But starting to look at Canada, South America, Germany is probably on the list for the next couple years.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. All right. Mention your brands again, how people can find it, if they want to go ahead and purchase some of this stuff, and how people can find you on the interwebs out there.

Ryan:

Yeah. So Beyond Braid, B-E-Y-O-N-D-B-R-A-I-D.com. Beyondbraid.com is the phishing brand. Professorpickleball.com is the pickleball brand. And if you just Google Ryan Maya, R-Y-A-N-M-A-Y-A, I have a YouTube channel, and that’s my Instagram handle. So I’m pretty Googleable.

You should be able to find me.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. Awesome. All right.

Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your story. And I’d like to touch base sometime maybe next year and see what Beyond Braid has done. And I want to hear about some extravagant trip that you took with your exit money from Professor Pickleball.

Ryan:

Cool. All right, man. Thank you.

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