#734 – 7-Figure Amazon Seller With a Full-Time Job

How do you build a 7-figure Amazon brand without quitting your day job or hiring a team? In this episode, Bradley sits down with Jason Ross from Puproar, a longtime listener turned first-time guest, who hit seven figures while working full-time and spending roughly five hours a week on the business.

Jason shares the real origin story: he didn’t start with a perfect product; his first launch (pickleball paddles) fizzled fast. But while that was happening, a dog toy idea started gaining traction, so he cut the loser and went all-in on pets. His unfair advantage is his product strategy: watch what’s trending for humans, then build the pet version and design every product with virality in mind so it performs naturally on TikTok and with affiliates.

You’ll also hear how Jason runs an ultra-lean operation: using Helium 10 tools like Profits to track margins daily, leveraging Search Query Analyzer to find high-converting terms (and attributing six figures in extra revenue to that data), protecting the brand with Amazon Transparency, and navigating seasonal challenges like Q4 inventory and Amazon capacity limits. If you want a blueprint for scaling without building a huge team, this one delivers.

In episode 734 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Jason discuss:

• 00:00 – Introduction
• 00:21 – 7-Figure Amazon Business In 5 Hours Per Week (No Employees)
• 03:30 – How He Discovered E-Commerce (And Why He Delayed Starting)
• 04:01 – First Launch In 2023 And Why Pickleball Paddles Failed
• 05:10 – The Pivot: Dog Toy Idea Takes Off, And He Commits To A Pet Brand
• 06:11 – 2025 Results: Seven Figures With Over 90% On Amazon
• 07:04 – Puproar Strategy: Human Trends Turned Into Pet Products
• 08:32 – TikTok Virality: Hero Product And Millions Of Views
• 10:01 – Still Working A Full-Time Job While Using An Ad Agency
• 12:28 – Favorite Helium 10 Tool: Profits And Margin Targets
• 16:57 – Using Search Query Analyzer And Attributing Six Figures To Keyword Data
• 23:58 – TikTok Shop Playbook: Affiliates And GMV Max Ads
• 27:54 – Counterfeits And Amazon Transparency ($0.05 Per Unit)
• 30:54 – Seasonal Inventory And Bidding For Amazon Capacity
• 37:03 – 2026 Goal: Flat Revenue, Higher Profit (Efficiency Focus)

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Imagine running a million-dollar Amazon business that started just a couple of years ago with no employees and only five hours a week of work. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got another longtime listener, first time caller here on the show, Jason. Welcome to the Serious Sellers Podcast. How’s it going?

Jason:

Awesome. Good to be here, Bradley. Thanks.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Now, since this is your first time on the show, we want to get to know you a little bit before we dive into your seller story here. But first of all, where are you calling in from? Where are you at right now?

Jason:

Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Bradley Sutton:

North Carolina. Okay. And is that around where you were born and raised?

Jason:

No. I grew up in the Northeast. It’s the balance between the Philadelphia area, Massachusetts.

And this time of year, I realized I had no desire to live up there. So I fled the Northeast for North Carolina for the college.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. NC State, Tar Heel, what did you end up doing?

Jason:

East Carolina University.

Bradley Sutton:

East Carolina University. Oh, my goodness. You got me on a mascot that I don’t know. I know like South Carolina’s Gamecocks, obviously the Tar Heels and everything. What’s the mascot there?

Jason:

Home of the Pirates, purple and gold.

Bradley Sutton:

Pirates. I should have known that. OK. All right. Well, what was your major?

Jason:

I went for engineering.

Bradley Sutton:

Engineering. And did you did you get into that upon graduation?

Jason:

Yeah. I went right into manufacturing engineering and then that led me through a series of operations, manufacturing jobs, process improvement, lean, six segments sort of thing. And served me well, learned a lot of process and problem solving along the way. And now I’m a business analyst for a national ministry.

Bradley Sutton:

How does one go from that to that?

Jason:

A similar set of skills just in terms of problem solving. But God put a couple of people in my way to yank me from production and to yeah, into a ministry that serves kids around the world.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, nice, nice. So you travel a lot like me, I guess. Now, do you travel for work?

Jason:

I think we shared a spot over the summer that you and I both went to Rwanda. Not often, but when I get to, it’s pretty special.

Bradley Sutton:

Rwanda is like big on tourism this year. I’m a Clippers fan and on the actual Clippers court like that. That’s like the main sponsor of the year, you know, like you pay millions of dollars or whatever for a spot. It says visit Rwanda right there. And yeah, Rwanda was a I was only there for like a day and a half or something. But I was like, man, this is a place I want to go back. Whenever I go first to a country, sometimes I’m like, all right, let me just check it out a little bit before committing to like a week vacation or something. But that’s definitely somewhere where I’d be down to go to go back.

Jason:

Yes.

 Bradley Sutton:

When and how do you discover e-commerce?

Jason:

In my in my manufacturing job, I had a buddy and a co-worker who was already in the game. He was selling on Amazon for years and he was on my shoulder telling me, just find a product, find a product.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, when was this about? What are we talking about? Year wise?

Jason:

Probably around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. And I just didn’t come up with anything. OK, for the time being.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So when did you launch your first product?

Jason:

Began in twenty-three. Actually,

Bradley Sutton:

I mean, it takes a long time to convince you to do something and look good for you for four years of him in your ears like, OK, fine, I’ll give it a try.

Jason:

Yeah, I made up plenty of excuses in the meantime, that’s for sure. But I had we actually had our second child and I had paternity leave. So figuring if I had six weeks of time, that would be a time to go kind of dive in and learn. So the first product we launched is not it didn’t last. We killed it within the first.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what was it?

Jason:

So we dove into pickleball paddles, which.

Bradley Sutton:

Rising up in the right time, right, twenty-three, it was saturated.

Jason:

I also had no idea what I was doing, so that didn’t help. And I think just from not knowing how to do ads, not understanding the data, didn’t have the budget to compete. But more than that, we right as I was sampling the pickleball paddle, we had an idea for a dog toy and we started sampling it at the same time and that started taking off. Organic ranking started boosting. And so pretty quickly we just killed the pickleball paddles and said, you know, let’s go all in on a dog and pet toy brand.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, interesting, interesting. Today I’m wearing two different Helium 10 logos. So it’s actually almost represents your pad. Like you found out about Helium 10 when this was our logo. You probably don’t even recognize this old logo. But you actually started with our new logo. What I’ve got here on the on the hat. But did you have Helium 10 like right from the get go or you just start on your own using other tools? What was going on back then?

Jason:

I had another tool that I was using, but honestly, it was this perfect.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s all right.

Jason:

Yeah. I started listening to this podcast as I was just trying to learn Amazon or e-commerce and was watching along the videos. I was like, man, I think this would just make my life a lot easier if I jumped for it, got on board. And I’ve been rolling with you guys since 24.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice, nice. Just fast forwarding, you know, we finished twenty-five just a few weeks ago. What did you end across all platforms? Gross sales for the year.

Jason:

Gross sales. We got into the seven figures. So that was a big milestone for us. But heavy on Amazon for sure. So over 90 percent of revenue still comes from Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Was twenty-five your first full calendar year of sales? Did you like start in the middle of twenty-four, the new brand?

Jason:

It was our second full year with the with the brand. But we had a lot of product expansion. I think we only had maybe two ASINs going into the year. So we had a full year of twenty-four and a full year of twenty-five.

Bradley Sutton:

How many ASINs did you end the year with?

Jason:

Around 12th.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. And what’s your brand name?

Jason:

Pup Roar. So, it’s like uproar with a P on the front.

Bradley Sutton:

So, I see you almost took a little bit of inspiration from your first product because the first thing that came up in the search results here is a pickleball dog toy.

Jason:

We couldn’t let it go. Yeah, we said, hey, it’s still a good idea. It’s still a trend. Yes. If you look through our product line, what you’re going to see is that any of the trends, the things that are popular and rising are things, at least in the human world, are things that we want to design for the pet world.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s kind of like your philosophy is, is not necessarily going for already what is hot or trending in the pet world, but almost being sometimes maybe being the first to do something because you’re going off of what’s trending, potentially even saturated. Like you said, pickleball for humans is saturated, but you’re like, hey, if you’re a pickleball aficionado and you have a pet, you’d probably be like, hey, let me get some pickleball gear for my pets.

Jason:

A hundred percent. Yeah, that was actually kind of the thesis even for the going into dog toys was, I mean, hey, we love dogs. It’s we don’t even play pickleball. So, it’s kind of silly for us to be in that game. But if we can design something that it made, that, you know, you look at Blackbox and different tools and like what’s the search volume for our long tail keywords, the search volume would have been zero. But we’re really blessed and fortunate that TikTok played a big role in putting us kind of solidifying our brand early on. Our staple hero product was the Tumblr, which was all the rage a couple of years ago. And so, we built that, built that product out and had a couple of videos going to the millions of views on TikTok. And that’s where we said, OK, let’s go all in on this.

Bradley Sutton:

Also, I’m just looking here at some of your catalog. There’s one product here you sold 4000 units of just in one month. This what is it like a golf?

Jason:

Exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Golf bag here. And I see a guitar. And, you know, is this a Tumblr that you were talking about right here?

Jason:

Exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

So you’re selling thousands of units. Looks like this is your hot Christmas, maybe gift or something. And I assume that that’s your biggest month.

Jason:

Yeah, absolutely. Over 40 percent of revenue comes from December alone. And that is only one of those products. There are red and white and Santa related. But it’s such a giftable low price point that it tends to go big in December.

Bradley Sutton:

So like last couple of years or was actually I assume it was only this year, like quarter of a million dollars just in one month. You’re able to move more than a quarter or three hundred three hundred thousand.

Jason:

Exactly. Yeah. A little more than that. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. Nice. You had told me, I think, while we were offline that this is not yet your full-time gig. Are you still doing that? That business? What do you say? Business analyst, business consultant?

Jason:

Exactly. Yeah. I’m a business analyst for international ministry, so I get the pleasure of working from home. But then I can do this on the side. And I pretty much to get it done with five hours a week, maybe a little more, maybe a big season. But

Bradley Sutton:

Seven figure brand, five hours a week. How cool is that? So your day job is like a full-time job.

Jason:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Technically, 40 hour a week, kind of three hour a week. Employees, people who are help you. VA’s? What’s the structure? Is that five hours just like literally that’s all you have to do? Or do you have a staff of people doing some random things?

Jason:

No staff. My wife and I, we might box up some wholesale orders together for Chewy or other wholesale partners. But no, staff. I do have an agency I work with for ads currently. I know we’ve talked about and just even Carrie and Destaney’s outsourced,

Bradley Sutton:

Outsourced to optimize show. Is that inspire you like, man, maybe I can.

Jason:

I’ve been digging into that thinking like, man, maybe that’s a lever to pull for this year in terms of just a little extra profit. But I mean, for sure, they help in just the ability for me to spend more time doing my real job and family and other obligations.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. All right. Well, yeah, this is this is this is pretty cool. I think I think just like every all of a sudden, the people just like got on the side of their chair with like what million-dollar business and he spends five hours with no employees. Like this is a kind of intriguing here. Now. You mentioned 90 percent of your sales is on Amazon USA. The 10 percent, where is it spread to?

Jason:

Yeah, it’s spread across TikTok shop faire F.A.I.R.E. wholesale. So just a bunch of small kind of mom-and-pop retail pet shops across the U.S. And then recently, thanks to a connection from someone at the elite program into Chewy online. So Chewy dot com. So she hooked me up with a person’s talk to that Gina.

Jason:

Exactly. Gina.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Yeah. Yeah. She’s been on the podcast before, too.

Jason:

So she got me the foot in the door there. And yeah, very fortunate.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. Favorite Helium 10 tool in the suite.

Jason:

I would say Profits because I’m in there every day, but I think really just to be able to.

Bradley Sutton:

What are you looking for when you go in profits? Just out of curiosity.

Jason:

Contribution margin. I’m looking at margin like I want to make sure we’re making money every day. Even if margins up, margins down, we’ll see. I mean, that’s where our ads play in to make sure that we’re effective from a TACoS and ACoS standpoint. But I want to make sure we’re not losing money. That’s especially in these days of tight profits. And we have lower price point products, you know, nine dollars to fifteen dollars. There’s not a whole lot of room in there.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. What’s what is your target profit margin?

 Jason:

If you had asked me going into this past year, I would have said 15 to 20 percent. Just try to stay in the 10 to 15 percent range, even right now. Now, some of that was launching new product. We had a bunch in July. So that took the overall profit margin down. But our hero products are in the 20 plus percent.

Bradley Sutton:

Since you are so lean of a company, has that helped with like your cash flow? Have you still always had to take on debt in order to fund inventory? How has that worked over the over the last couple of years?

Jason:

So far, no debt. And now we play the credit card game to get some cash back for sure. But that’s been one thing as we’ve gone into more of a wholesale of we’ve been able to avoid any SBA loans or taking on other people’s money. But cash flow is definitely the one of the struggles we have in being such a seasonal business of having to stockpile inventory in the summer months and then, you know, being able to get one nice paycheck in December. But it’s a long waiting game in October and November to get there.

Bradley Sutton:

For a new product from your factory, what’s the M.O.Q.? We’re normally.

Jason:

I won’t launch with less than a couple of thousand. At first, it was maybe five hundred. That’s what they would say is about you. Maybe even 250. They’ve been great to work with. I’ve just I learned the hard way early on that. If I go to lean on the first order and it hits really well, then I’m air shipping and I might as well just add it, added some more to the initial order so that I don’t eat that later on.

Bradley Sutton:

So, yeah, the reason I’m asking is I’m just curious, you know, like traditionally, if people are going after stuff that there’s already existing demand, you can make some calculations and have more of an educated guess. Like, hey, you know, I have some confidence that this product is going to work. But when you’re launching stuff that I assume most of this stuff, if not all, don’t even exist before you launch it. It’s, you know, some a little bit of a leap of faith.

Bradley Sutton:

But on the flip side, you know, with your retail price being so low, I assume your costs are also low. But do you just go in and just like, I’m just going to order this? What’s your research like as far as your validation? Like, do you have test runs at all or you’re just like, you know what? This looks good. Oh, how do you have a no go, no go, you know, criteria?

Jason:

Yeah, I don’t necessarily do TEPs listings, but I do a lot of data on the front end of a lot of research on human trends. So we’ve got we’re always I’m always looking at, like, what are gifts that people are buying for people? And I’m going off of that. So there is a little bit of a leap of faith, but it’s all rooted in existing data for humans.

Bradley Sutton:

So have you failed last year at launch?

Jason:

We’ve had some that have. I mean, we probably made back the cost, but have not been profitable. What do you remember what it was? Yeah, our first our first failure was a ballot toy. And it’s still on there. We just don’t really want a ballot. Like, so we watched it during the election.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, a ballot. But at first I thought you’re saying a ballot. I’m like, what the heck is that?

Is this a new word? I don’t know. Ah

Jason:

And so the options were, you know, Republican, Democrat or dog. And there was a check for the dog. Now, very seasonal. Once every four years. And if it doesn’t go, it doesn’t go. So just, yeah, if there’s a failure, learn quick, fail fast and move on.

Bradley Sutton:

You mentioned Helium 10 profits. What other Helium 10 tools are you using regularly?

Jason:

Yeah, I run a mixture all the time of the new SQA tool. And then I take what I learned there and that I translate that into campaigns and Helium 10 ads. So love that I can go in and see it.

Bradley Sutton:

So what are you looking for? Like where, you know, the and by the way, by SQA, he means Search Query Analyzer. Are you looking at the keywords that brought you sales or not even sales? Are you looking more at like your, you know, how your click through rate compares to the competition or your conversion rate? Which metrics tell you, hey, let me go and do something more in advertising for this?

Jason:

Big things I’m looking for are conversion rate. And so click through it. But a lot of conversion rate against the market, especially for larger or more broad search terms. So if I’m looking at something that I only exist, like golf club, dog toy, I probably own that if I’m the only one. But in terms of dog gift or birthday, you know, things that are more broad that apply to more things, I’m looking for leverage. I could pull where I might have a better conversion rate than the market.

And then if I don’t have ads that are already there, I can add that. And if I do, I can just add budget and looking to just increase my organic ranking through the for those high leverage search terms.

Bradley Sutton:

Some of this stuff is probably hard to calculate. But if you were just to estimate how much money this data has given you, you know, thanks to Amazon supply. I mean, this is, you know, you don’t know how lucky you are. Maybe you do. But twenty-three before you started twenty-two, there was no such thing as search query performance that Amazon, every seller was like, how do I know what keywords brought me sales? But with this data and then what you were able to gain from it. Rough estimate with how much extra gross revenue it’s gotten you by leveraging search query performance.

Jason:

Yeah, I was just looking through our December performance and I was able to run some ranking campaigns going into the season purely based on some of that data. And at least 10 percent is attributed to those keywords, specifically those targets that we were able to add.

Bradley Sutton:

So just in December or for the year,

Jason:

For the year. But, you know, most of that being realized in December.

Bradley Sutton:

So six figures of revenue just because you’re using Helium 10 Search Query Performance reports and getting that data that Amazon is graciously giving and implementing it.

Jason:

Yeah. And there’s probably more than that that you can’t attribute because you are taking that data and putting it in the bullets and the titles, all that. But just from the targets that we’re able to put in Helium 10 ads, it’s been a huge, huge lever.

Bradley Sutton:

So hold on. Like you, even though you’re using an agency for your advertising, you’re still using Helium 10 ads?

Jason:

Absolutely. I as a way to make sure that they’re performing. I don’t want to be completely in the dark. Yeah, but I’m checking their performance on a daily, weekly basis. I took

Bradley Sutton:

Like running the analytics and stuff like that on there.

Jason:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Looking at dashboards and keeping them honest. I like it.

Jason:

Exactly. And I know part of the what you’ve always said on the podcast is before you go to an agency, make sure you understand it. So I did it myself for a while before I turned over the keys. But I don’t have not 100 percent there on the turnover, I guess.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, OK. I think your whole business structure is kind of a unique strategy, you know, like looking for stuff that humans like and making it for pets. It’s almost similar to my strategy with some of my spooky brands. I’ve got multiple spooky brands that people don’t even know about. But it’s like, hey, what is saturated, you know, in just the regular non spooky world, you know, like a shelf, like a wall shelf or like a bath mat, you know. But then let me add a coffin shape or a bat shape. And now all of a sudden it’s in a no competition in a saturated niche. But so that’s a strategy in itself. What other unique things do you think you’re doing that have contributed to your success? Because very few people can say, hey, I run a million dollar business on five hours a week.

Jason:

I think so much of it does go into the product design and the product research up front. Part of the idea of even going in this space was let’s design for virality from the get go. So, like it’s easy to think about the product from a design standpoint, but we also think about the channel that is going to be marketed in. So thinking what will what will be shareable in a TikTok format, what’s going to go well with affiliates that they or people want to share so that, you know, being a kind of a one man show and two men with my wife here just in our own house running the business, we don’t have the huge budget to do massive marketing campaigns. But if we can design to where we get free organic marketing, where people want to share a product for free, then they’re going to be doing us a service and we win.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. OK, you just brought up a very interesting thing. Every single one of your products is a unique design. You’re not just, you know, slapping a label on existing products out there. How do you design these things? You have a designer using AI. How do you get that initial concept to your factory so it becomes a physical product?

Jason:

Yeah, we’ve gotten really fortunate with someone that we met through Fiverr. It’s I think it’s a little bit a hit or miss of who you get over there. And our first one wasn’t great, but we’ve been working with the same designer for three years now.

And she’s been excellent. So very fortunate to have met her. But we send her the idea of kind of the must haves of the design rough dimensions of where we want it. And she’ll draw up the 2D tech pack to send over to the factory. And at that point, we’re just working on sampling directly with that.

Bradley Sutton:

Any other revenue you can attribute to using a Helium 10 tool, like you just mentioned, 100K for Search Query Analyzer, anything else that’s out there that you’ve been using that that definitely has given you a bump?

Jason:

I love the historical Cerebro. I think just in locking that in with the Search Query Analyzer tool, because we’re so seasonal and sometimes holiday dependent to be able to go in and whether we’re looking at competitors or ourselves over a given year, but not just for the search terms, but then to be able to look at how should I forecast the business? Because we have to put such large production orders and, in the May, June, July time period, we’ve got to be pretty certain of what’s going to sell in December at that point.

 Jason:

So we’re locking into what are the spikes for different search terms and how would that translate into the products that we need to order and produce, especially when we’re talking six months prior?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. TikTok shop. When do you start there?

Jason:

2024. So really early on, back when money was a little free on TikTok, they were giving out subsidies to sellers and buyers. But really, we just had an organic post of one of our customers go for I think she had something over three million.

And that’s what really shot us up. So since then, we’ve been digging into that, working with affiliates on a commission basis, had some good relationships with different affiliates that we’ve worked with consistently. And then some were just looking at, you know, always looking for new ones and then running GMV max ads through some of those videos, because one thing that I am not, I might like the numbers and the operations, but I’m not a creative and sitting there with the iPhone and coming up with new TikTok’s is not my not my game, but there’s a lot of people that love doing that. So, if I can give them a couple dollar product and they come up with creative ways to show it and then they get some commission and we get some sales and then we just run some ads through those.

Bradley Sutton:

If you were to take TikTok by itself, nothing else existed. Your TikTok business, are you profitable on TikTok or are you ready to just kind of like get more profitable on Amazon?

Jason:

Yeah. I mean, just because of the fee structure over there, we find it usually more profitable than Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Wow.

Jason:

But there’s definitely it doesn’t tell the whole picture. There’s a there’s an absolute halo effect between TikTok and Amazon. If we when we are running GME Max ads or when an organic video pops off, guaranteed that Amazon is going to get a big lift. So kind of hard to exactly say how much more profitable it is. And some of that shows up in the Amazon numbers, but just also a big advantage to be able to run that off Amazon traffic into Amazon from a ranking standpoint.

Bradley Sutton:

Have you started using any of the Helium 10 TikTok tools?

Jason:

Yeah, being able to sort and filter is just like a lot of the Helium 10 tools. Just makes it easier to be able to find what you want to find the in console TikTok platform. It’s not bad, but definitely makes it easier to be able to find by category, by performance, all those things. And that’s

Bradley Sutton:

What kind of things are you looking for?

Jason:

Def more so performance. Like I don’t really care necessarily about views. And even some of the big accounts, you have some accounts have. One video that popped off for a couple hundred thousand and then you look through their account and they might have 50 views, 75 views. So I’d like to see, you know, from a GME standpoint or a number of products that have been purchased, is it 100 to 1000? Is it 1000 plus? Are you consistently selling and then dive into their profile? If I can just make sure that the brand kind of aligns with our vibe.

Bradley Sutton:

If I were to give you the keys to the Helium 10 roadmap for TikTok, what could we make for you that we don’t currently have that would make your life easier on the on the platform?

Jason:

I think I was actually fortunate to talk to one of your developers last week, and we were talking through some of the AI just enablement’s that I think there’s a large ability to still pull in some native language, AI and pull in data from TikTok and then have that work into our Amazon business, whether that’s pulling search terms or things that are going viral on TikTok and then putting ad campaigns around them for Amazon. Right now, though, that seems to be a walled garden between the two. But I think there could be a lot more synergy between them.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, cool. You mentioned offline or and also in one of our calls, I think, to use transparency, Amazon transparency. What prompted that? Were you getting like people copycats or piggybacks on your listing? What was going on there?

Jason:

Yeah, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was Thanksgiving morning and I’m trying to smoke a turkey downstairs. And then suddenly I just get all these Helium 10 alerts in my email. Buy box lost. I didn’t really know what that meant. You know, I was so early on. And it turns out that, yeah, there’s a couple of Chinese factories or Chinese sellers that were putting some counterfeit products on our listing. And then I think I reached out to you. Hey, what do I do?

Jason:

Yeah, you turned me on to someone in the elite program, but went through something similar. Turns out we had our application for our trademark in process, but it wasn’t processed to the patent office yet. So we couldn’t have that to hang our head on. So once we did get that to go through, we did the transparency program. So now every product goes out with that unique ID. So Amazon knows it’s us when it goes out the fulfillment center.

Bradley Sutton:

So talk about that program a little bit. Like, is there an application fee? Is it a per unit fee? Does every single one of your products have to have like a special barcode? There’s some of our listeners might not know about transparency.

Jason:

Yeah, it’s a it’s a platform. It’s a web-based portal that you go through and you sign up each individual product that you want to have protected. And it’s five cents. So every label, every unique, every product, it’s a unique identifier, even if it’s the same product that validates it as true to your brand and that it is yours. And so Amazon, as they fill your orders are making sure that it’s legit and scanning that. And if it doesn’t have that, they’ll kick it out.

So you get a performance dashboard that shows you how many copycats have tried to do that and jump on your listings and that they’ve protected you from. So we’ve got through the last quarter, Q4, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all the Christmas sales and didn’t have to worry about all that.

Bradley Sutton:

Is it transparency itself that can get people kicked off the listing or how did you get them kicked off now? Now, transparency helps protect like where, you know, people, you know, Amazon can see who’s got the real, you know, the real stuff. But what actually got them kicked off?

Jason:

Right now, it’s not. So we don’t even have other people on our buy box. There are no other sellers on our actual listings. It’s so it’s for preventing others from also to be able to list against our products, whereas in the past we were in a fight to the bottom of, OK, well, who’s got the buy box based on price? We now have that secured.

Bradley Sutton:

Switching gears. You’ve said multiple times how seasonal of a product you are. Now, with some seasonal products, I know a struggle is this Amazon, you know, like capacity where it’s like you’ve got this certain sales velocity and then they tell you, all right, this is how much you can work with for next month. But if you have, you know, like let’s say August, September or something is like super slow. Well, then maybe your October, November storage, Amazon is going to be restricting you. Have you run into problems with that? And if so, how do you work around that as a seasonal company?

Jason:

Absolutely. That was one of the or one of the lessons that we learned the hard way early on. So Amazon, when you when you begin your journey, they don’t know how you’re going to perform.

So they really just let you take the space that you need. Now, there’s a certain point, and I forget if it’s 10 or 12 months in, but that’s when they start giving you your capacity limits. Unfortunately for us, we had already placed our big Q4 holiday order when those limits came in. So that first year, 2024 Q4, we didn’t know how to go and get more space. Didn’t know about the capacity manager. So we ended up sitting on a bunch of lost revenue at our 3PL that we just couldn’t send in.

 Jason:

So when we’d send it in in December, you know, it was too late to get prime eligible. So this year we took it to heart and we were able to bid on more space. So we were able to bid and just doubled our capacity. Now you’re on the hook for that. But as long as you sell through, that’s not at a cost. So, we’re able to sell.

Bradley Sutton:

So how does that work? There’s a button, right, where it has your capacity and it says bid on extra. What are you bidding for, like a per unit price, an overall amount? Or how does that work?

Jason:

Yeah, so you can I think there’s a tool in there. The Amazon will do it based on the space that you need based on units. I found it easier just to go in and do it by the amount of space that I thought I needed. So if I was at thirty-five hundred in the in the capacity, I just went and said, OK, what’s it going to take to double and get to seven thousand? So now you’re on the hook for that. And if you’re bidding, you know, four dollars or three dollars per cubic foot, then and you don’t sell it, then you owe that at the end. But they offset or they give you performance credits as you go. So as you sell through, they credit that back. And then you don’t end up actually getting charged. So, we were able to get all the space we needed for the inventory we had and didn’t get any additional fees.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, cool. Have you ever had too much inventory where you started forecasting some storage fees and actually had to take inventory out? Or even if you miss a forecast, you kind of just let it ride with the long term storage fees?

Jason:

Yeah, we’ve we missed forecast with a couple of the new Asians that we launched in July. Didn’t exactly know how to forecast that in to the fourth quarter when there really was no history yet. So definitely overordered in that area. And then ended up just discounting a little bit to sell through to avoid some of the excess storage fees and just get a little bit of cash blowback. I’d say the biggest headache around that was then not necessarily from a cash flow standpoint, taking that cash and putting in hero products. So that was a mess where we could have made some good profits, but a learning for next year, for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

OK, now you mentioned a couple of times being able to get some tangible value just from the community in Helium 10 Elite program, helping you get into Chewy and helping you with the transparency program. How long have you been an elite member?

Jason:

I think for a year and a half, at least. So early on, I was just doing the Helium 10, the basic program and just kept hearing the benefits through the through the podcast. But it’s easily paid for itself time over time and time again in those things that you mentioned, which are thousands of dollars, but also in some of the Elite workshops that we get to be a part of, even

Bradley Sutton:

Just like a little nugget here or something, then you implement it in your business and you see results. Is that what you’re talking about?

Jason:

Yeah, I mean, there’s been a lot in the AI space over the last year. And then I think from an emotional standpoint, when the tariffs hit, we’re sitting there on a Friday all together, figuring, yeah, OK, now what? Everything got 254 percent more expensive. What do we do to be able to bounce ideas off each other when the unexpected hits? Definitely just huge for myself. When you’re a company of one or two, it helps to have people around you.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, guys, if you want to, you know, be able to hang out in some of these meetings and any events with Jason and in the elite program, just go to H10.me/elite. Might be in your pricing page, too. Yes, if you’re a Ready Dive member, it’s only a ninety-nine dollars extra charge to be part of that that program. Going to any conferences this year for Amazon or do you ever do that or you just kind of stick to yourself other than these virtual meetups?

Jason:

Haven’t yet. I would love to. And then also looking at maybe some getting into the pet space as well through for conferences and

Bradley Sutton:

There’s a big one in Vegas. What’s it called?

Jason:

That’s a global pet expo at a super zoo.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, super zoo. That’s the one that’s the one I was thinking of.

Jason:

Yeah, we signed up last year for one of them for a booth and then got a cold feet. So maybe we’ll take the jump now that we’re a little more established with the product class.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. OK, cool. Well, it’s been great to see your growth with Helium 10 with on Amazon and now TikTok. And would you have a you have a goal for the end of this year, like a revenue figure that you’re going to try and hit that? Maybe we bring you back on next year. I can I can see if you hit it or not.

Jason:

Yeah, I think conservatively, I mean, honestly, I’d be OK with flat revenue if that meant double the margin or even like 50 percent to 50 percent better profits. I think there’s just we’ve been learning as we go. And so, I think there’s still just a lot of low hangry fruit and ad efficiency, operational efficiency that even if we didn’t grow at all, I think there’s still some more money being left on the table that we can go after. So, let’s see

Bradley Sutton:

If there are time on the horizon where you see yourself retiring from the day job. Is there like a certain number you have to hit before you can do that? Or what or are you you’re perfectly fine working day job and having this is almost a seven-figure side hustle.

Jason:

I don’t know. I love what I do. So, yeah, I think it would have to be where it takes more time. But it’s leaning on the tools and the people around me to hopefully be able to do both.

Bradley Sutton:

Like it, like it. All right. Well, Jason, thank you so much for joining us. Very inspiring story and wish you all the best of success going forward.

Jason:

Great. Thanks, Bradley.

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