If you’re a seller online, then you may have dabbled or even considered going to Amazon. Rightly so since it has become a ripe ground for a lot of entrepreneurs. With the space becoming more and more crowded, how then can you navigate and stand out? In this episode, Elliot Begoun invites Andy Thompson, the Head of Customer Success at MixShift, to share how emerging brands can leverage Amazon data to help you sell online and grow your business. Amazon has a $40 billion advertising business, putting the pressure on emerging brands to know a lot about advertising and thrive in it. Allow Andy to help you navigate through that space as he provides many insights and strategies to help you grow.

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Leveraging Amazon Data To Sell Online And Grow Your Business With Andy Thompson

Before I turn it over to Andy to let him introduce himself and tell you a little bit about what he’s got going on and start our enthralling conversation that I’m looking forward to, a couple of housekeeping things to share. First of all, as a reminder of an exciting partnership and collaboration that TIG Brands and New Hope have formed going forward at Expo East. We’ll be introducing the TIG Brands/New Hope Natural Business School, where we will be playing a role in crafting and shaping the curriculum.

Leading up to that, starting in the month of March 2023 and every month thereafter, we will be hosting a virtual workshop hitting on the topics that we’re going to bring in more depth to the Natural Business School. These are going to be things that you, as entrepreneurs, can take back to your businesses immediately and start using. We’re going to be talking about how to put profit before growth and cash before everything.

We’re going to be exploring capital efficiency, the supply, or the shopper continuum. We’re going to be looking at fun-filled things like cashflow and all of those kinds of things. It’s the actionable, meaty stuff that you all can use. We’re thrilled to have New Hope partner with us. We’re all committed to doing the same thing, which is arming the entrepreneurs of our industry with the tools, education, access, and support that they need to succeed. There is more to come on that, but I wanted to share that.

There are two other quick things. The TIG Collective is an innovative approach to getting advisors and entrepreneurs connected. Andy is one of our member advisors. The TIG Collective brings together industry experts. Subject matter wisdom and connects that with the entrepreneurs who need it most. While doing that, we hope to educate both sides, helping these advisors learn the craft of advising and, hopefully, find opportunities on future boards to help entrepreneurs learn to do more than collect advisors, but tap their wisdom and the intelligence of it.

Truthfully, entrepreneurs need to unlock that wisdom. They need people who can help them avoid some of the costly mistakes or connect them to that one person who can make a difference or think through something with them. On the flip side, we need more diversity on our boards. We need more women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ representation, not only because it’s right from a societal perspective, but also, because the communities that our brands serve are diverse communities.

If our boards look like me, a middle-aged White dude, we’re going to miss things. We’re going to miss connecting with our consumers and that could be a huge loss for a brand and a huge loss for an entrepreneur. Also, an even bigger loss for our industry as a whole. If you want to learn more about being either an advisor in the TIG Collective or an entrepreneur, please reach out to any of us here at TIG Brands or go to our website, www.TIGBrands.com and click on Communities. You’ll find a page that goes through all of the details of the Collective.

The other thing is the TIG Venture Community. There are a lot of talks right now about capital and how hard it is for emerging brands. While it always has been, in some ways, it’s harder and in some ways, I’m more optimistic. The reality is that not every brand has a path to be a unicorn, yet so much of the funding that we do is based that way. What the TIG Venture Community is built to do is to support the entrepreneurs who have great brands, but are also committed to building good businesses and who want to focus on optionality.

That’s putting profit before growth and cash before everything and getting to the point where they’re EBITDA positive and they need investment too. They need money to make money. It’s the old adage. The TIG Venture Community is based instead on unlocking and finding that grand slam home run. We’re looking for singles and doubles. We’re recruiting more investors for the fund. These are industry people who like the industry and want to support industries like family offices and Angel investors who are tired of trying to do it all on their own.

If you want to learn more about being an investor in an innovative and dynamic rolling fund, please reach out to me directly or to Jenny, and we are happy to share more information. If you’re an entrepreneur looking for patient capital and a different approach using innovative instruments like care and so forth, reach out to any of us or join our community and we’ll be happy to share more.

Andy, I’m done with all the bullshit here. Thanks for doing this with me. Thanks also for consistently and constantly being a champion of entrepreneurs, a champion of the TIG Brands and for being a part of the Collective. Take a minute and let everybody know who you are or what you’re doing and then we’ll go from there.

Thanks, Elliot. I love everything that TIG does and it’s a big reason why I’m here and I’m excited. My name’s Andy Thompson. My main role is the entrepreneur, which means I wear many hats. The main thing I’m doing right now is I’m the Head of Customer Success at a software company called Mix Shift. We’re a software company focused on Amazon data, which, if you’ve heard, Amazon and data are both big things right now.

There are a lot of cool things. I have two good friends who have co-founded that and I’m excited. I used to be a customer. I’m excited to flip over to the software side, which is very different for me. Before that, I was in the media agency world for about six and a half years. I led the Amazon division at an agency here in Denver. I managed many brands. That’s my trade or my skill.

I’ve been selling or trying to sell stuff on Amazon for over ten years now. One of the things that I love about it is Amazon is a ripe ground for a lot of entrepreneurial ideas and thoughts. There’s a lot of testing, but there’s a lot of frustration for a lot of companies too. I’ve done that for a long time. I’ve found a good little niche in that area as well. I have bumped into a lot of cool brands and products along the way.

If you were to pick one thing that was kind of an a-ha to unlocking Amazon that you think a lot of entrepreneurs are missing, what would that be?

This is going to sell as self-serving, but this was the big thing in the agency world because we are always trying to justify our existence. A lot of brands think about Amazon as different than the rest of their online or even the rest of their sales channels. A lot of that can be frustrating. You’re playing by Amazon’s rules. It’s an open marketplace. There’s a lot of mystery behind it. For a lot of brands, it can be frustrating, but I think the thing that a lot of brands miss is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with Amazon. You’re only redoing it. You’re on a different racetrack.

One example of that is a lot of brands don’t know what the lifetime value of an Amazon customer is. They don’t know, “How many times does an Amazon customer reorder from me?” That’s so crucial if you were measuring that in any other sales channel to how many times a customer orders from me, especially in the natural products industry when so many things are consumable. You’re not focused on that first purchase so why would you care so much about it on Amazon? You should care about it more about the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th purchase by loyal customers.

Let’s talk a little bit about being an advisor and what that means to you. I’ve never asked this question on a show before to some of the other Collective advisors. What drew you to it? Why do you do it?

One of the things that I learned in the pandemic early on was and I think TIG was a big part of this. The community around TIG was that. It was the need for community as an entrepreneur. As I’ve gone into my own ventures now, I’ve realized that’s such a big part of the career journey for successful people is having a community around you to support you. I think that’s why the TIG Collective drew me in because it has that mindset and I’ve certainly benefited from listening to and getting to know the other advisors.

Social capital is how we can open doors for people who normally wouldn’t have doors opened to them. That’s what stands out to me and as an advisor. It’s being able to do that and help. If I have a tangible skill or trade to offer, that’s great, but in some ways, it’s also more beneficial for me. I feel a little self-serving being an advisor because it’s an opportunity for both parties.

That’s the whole premise behind it. The premise behind the collective mentality is that there’s a benefit for all. It’s not only extractive, but each person involved has an opportunity to build and develop more professionally and build their businesses. Also, for the advisors to participate in the aggregate upside of that, too, is an exciting thing to be a part of.

To say you have a vested interest in some of these entrepreneurial brands is a cool thing. It also puts a level of ownership or stakeholder mentality to it, which is healthy. I’m going to shift back to what you’re seeing in the landscape because now you’re slightly removed from the day-to-day transactional side and you’re seeing things around the data side. What are you noticing? What are you seeing putting on your swami hat? What should entrepreneurs be paying attention to right now because there’s a lot that’s changed?

The pandemic had this big, incredible uptake and a lot of these emerging brands had phenomenal new growth. Since mid-’21 or maybe ’22, it’s gone the other way where ACOS has gone up and it’s getting harder to find, and costs are rising. Channel your inner advisor or somebody’s submitted to the Collective wanting to talk through their eComm strategy and, specifically, their Amazon strategy. What kind of questions are you asking them to ask themselves?

A lot of what I’m seeing in the aggregate, and I saw this at the agency side as well being in the day-to-day. I think where the successful brands that I’ve worked with know when to say no. I think that was what was so hard about the pandemic for a brand selling online. You felt like you had to say yes and most of the time, you did. You had to say yes because you didn’t have another option. You had to say, “I got to go chips to the middle of the table online because I don’t have another option or I have this idea and I don’t know.”

I’m not telling any brands not to sell online. They’re very few brands that I come across. What’s become more difficult for a brand online is saying no to so many opportunities. Do you put all your money in TikTok? Do you pay influencers? Do you do Meta advertising still? Are you going all in on Amazon? Do you sell on your website? Do you run Google searches? How do you invest across your retail network in terms of investing as all these stores and retail networks start to have digital options? That’s what brands need to focus on especially going in the way that a lot of things are for brands learning to say no to a lot of things earlier than you would want to.

Also, not feeling like you’re missing out on an opportunity. Online is exciting because it seems so accessible, but that doesn’t mean that you have to say yes to everything. You see that bear out where in the data side, if you say yes to everything, you don’t get significance in the data or you don’t get the right signals. Whereas, if you can go deep into 1 or 2 opportunities online, you figure out what works and then apply those to new opportunities when you’re ready for them. That’s what I would tell a brand right now.

What do you think’s going to be the future for emerging brands as it relates to Amazon? Is it going to continue to be as critical a channel or do you think a lot of these smaller brands are going to get swept away? What do you sense?

It’s become a lot harder. I remember early in Amazon, the main goal we had when we worked with a brand was to only list your products and it doesn’t matter what they look like. That’s what I did. I listed products originally and sales happened. You can’t do that anymore. What’s hard for brands right now is the pressure to advertise and that’s where Amazon is heading. Amazon has a $40 billion advertising business.

You’re going to need to know a lot about advertising and as an emerging brand, you’re going to have to understand how to hold someone accountable if they’re running it for you or how to run it yourself. Those are hard things. For a lot of entrepreneurs, that’s a foreign language to them. That’s something you’re going to have to at least have some fluency in because it’s much like the first page of Google. If you’re not on the first page of Google, you’re not going to see the volume.

Amazon’s not quite that way yet, but there’s a lot more pressure now to get to that first page and that requires capital. That’s going to require advertising dollars. It can be tough for emerging brands to find, but it’s heading that way. It’s going to get more complicated and not less or maybe not complicated and more complex in how to launch a brand. That’s part of it is there are also more opportunities to do that. Amazon’s not going anywhere when they get 60% of online searches to start on Amazon. You’re going to see Amazon last for quite a while in terms of dominance. It’s not going anywhere for the next foreseeable future.

Do you see anything coming up for emerging brands or other platforms they should watch? I know Walmart.com is still trying to put a lot into their other third-party eTailers. What do you see in the landscape?

In the midst of the pandemic, Walmart got a lot of impressions and they’ve certainly grown. I’m not going to dump all over a large retailer like Walmart, but I think what a lot of brands, the amount of effort it will take you to multiply into other channels might not be worth it when you could double down. There’s a lot of success on Amazon. I see it happen all the time with emerging brands. They cap out way too early on Amazon when they could be investing. Instead of $4,000 or $5,000 a month, they could be returning the same amount if they invested $10,000 or $20,000 a month on Amazon because the volume is so much higher.

That’s not true in every category. There are some challenges. If you are more brick-and-mortar focused as a brand, but you have that itch to advertise digitally, Instacart is a good option because you can start to see how your brand behaves online against competitors. It’s more of a data mining exercise to use something like Instacart. Doubling down on what works is where I would encourage brands to go before they go into a Walmart and all these other retailers.

If you feel you have a path where your voice is going to be heard a lot more, you can explore those kinds of things knowing that the volume of visitors is substantially less. I think Amazon has something like 82% household penetration when it comes to Prime or some massive number like that.

If you realize now, Amazon is more of an advertising platform and to have any advertising platform with that kind of penetration into shoppers is crazy. The other thing about Amazon is it’s still very brand agnostic. Almost 80% of all searches on Amazon don’t include a brand term. I think that’s where a lot of opportunity is still for emerging brands or people are not only going to Amazon looking for their favorite brands.

If they’ve got a favorite brand, a lot of times, you do see more parody between your website and Amazon, but where you’re going to find it is when you’re looking at those longer tail search terms where they’re adding modifiers onto it. That’s where merchant brands have the opportunity. The volume is not going to be as high, but it’s cheaper. It’s more efficient to do, and you get a brighter identity to the consumer if you can find those 5 to 10 terms that you can be the best at.

How do you find those terms? I always say it’s like being on a parade route. If you go to Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the goal is to find some alleyway or someplace that not everybody else is, and where you can get a pretty decent view of the parade. That’s what it is when you’re trying to find that keyword or that place where you can stake out, where maybe you get a better chance of being found. What’s the process there? How does somebody figure that out?

Some simple keyword research and brainstorming. There are a lot of free tools out there that you can research keyword volume on. If you want to pay for a tool, it can be inexpensive. One of the simplest ways to do it if you don’t want to pay for it as a brand is to go type in a keyword to start on Amazon and let the autofill tell you what the searches are. What modifiers are people asking?

Amazon doesn’t surface this a lot. They don’t tell you when people select an autofill, but you can see some terms. They don’t sound like solid English searches like you would see on Google because the searches are based on volume. It’s based on what Amazon thinks the consumers want. You can start to see search terms. Look at those suggested fills. It’s a great way to find ten words and then you go and you can create campaigns.

If anyone’s being super technical, I would create an automatic campaign on Amazon and you put your products in it. Amazon scrapes your listing for those terms that you researched and they’ll start showing you. They’ll show you against competitor products. You have to know how to change your campaign and optimize it, so you don’t waste money, but I see brands that have a pretty good idea spending less than $500. You can have a good idea of what those 5 to 10 terms are and get some sales out of it. You’ll probably break even on that.

Everyone loves a good car crash. What are the mistakes that you see being made out there?

One mistake and, coming from the agency side, a lot of brands work with the wrong partner too soon. It’s something that’s hard and this is obvious for most entrepreneurs. The more you can do as an operator within your own business, the better, especially early on. However, there is a point where you can’t do everything and find that balance. I see a lot of brands hire agencies, just like with brands emerging during the pandemic. There are a lot of service providers emerging during the pandemic. There are some great ones. Not everyone needs ten years of Amazon experience because seven of those years of my experience are now outdated.

I think finding someone who understands your brand and understands your goals and what’s realistic is where I see a lot of brands misstep. It’s hard because you’re putting a lot of trust in that provider. Having a relationship and knowing what questions to ask as you’re evaluating a partner to provide that service because it is a critical sales channel. I see so many brands find one person and the sales deck looks nice. “I don’t know what my budget should be. It sounds good.”

There are two ways. They overpromise or underpromise, which is almost worse if your agency or service partner underdelivers for what’s possible. It’s almost better to shoot too high and fail but I think a lot of brands are, “This is only what’s possible.” They don’t push it because they don’t realize their full potential.

I also see that impatience is a challenge. If the results aren’t immediate, people give up too soon without validating whether maybe it just needed a little bit more refinement or needed a little bit more time. What they wind up being is like squirrels chasing their next nut. They’re moving all over the place and wondering why they’re not making any progress because they’re doing too many things too frequently and can’t draw any inferences as to what did or did not work.

I totally agree and I think that’s where that comes down to knowing how to evaluate success on Amazon and realizing that you are not in a sprint. You’re in a marathon. You’re probably in an ultra-marathon or a long walk. You’re going to a destination that’s going to take a while to get to. Brands that launch that hit 6 or 7 figures in 1 to 3 months are exceedingly rare. I looked at it. There are six million-selling accounts on Amazon right now for third-party sellers. It sounds like a big number, but only about 800,000 of those are doing more than $100,000 in sales.

There are brands that are doing unicorns. It gets back to the same mindset. There are a ton of unicorns with Amazon companies that have IPO’d. They started as a third party. That is probably not realistic for most brands and I think realizing that and having realistic expectations that it’s going to take six months before you even feel comfortable, but it can. You can get to that steady state. Once it’s in a steady state, you can start to make some of those decisions like, “Should I look at Walmart? Should I invest more?” You can start to ask some of those questions, but I totally agree. Many brands feel, “Why isn’t this working,” and they’re still three to six months out from asking those questions?

The other thing I see is they have a limited budget, but they sprinkle that budget over too many things too. It makes everything that they’re doing that much more diffused and, therefore, potentially ineffective. How do you build a steady state? I know that every category and brand is different, all those kinds of things. I get it, but more generically or generalized, what advice would you give to an entrepreneur who has a reasonable mindset and expectation of, “I don’t expect to go from where I am now to multiple millions in Amazon sales in three months. However, I would like to begin to feel confident that this is going to be a growing part of my business.

What I see in a lot of businesses that are omnichannel is that as the pendulum swings in terms of what the industry’s talking about, their attention swings. They go back and forth. Many of them get Amazon to this place where, “Yeah. I’m on Amazon. It’s conformational. If somebody searches for me on Amazon, they’ll find us. We have enhanced brand content. We show up well, but we’ve never been able to do anything meaningful.

The thing I always peg that seems to be a consistent theme is always staying in stock with your inventory. It never ceases to amaze me how brands are surprised when their sales go down when they don’t have any inventory at Amazon. You cannot sell what is not in stock. I need to find a different way to say it, but if you don’t have a product, you can’t sell the product. I think that’s a big distinguishing factor.

I think water brands spread themselves too thin there where they offer every product they have and expect them all to do well. If something doesn’t do well on Amazon, you don’t have to sell it on Amazon, especially if it steals from another channel that sells well. It’s always amazing how Amazon sales might not mimic other sales channels for brands.

It gets back down to what we’ve been talking about, doubling down with what works. You might only have 1 of your 10 flavors on Amazon or you might only do a variety pack on Amazon, which I realize is harder to do for a lot of brands. If I had a brand and I only could sell one product, I would sell a variety mixed-pack of all my different flavors that I was confident I would sell well. I would invest all my money and initial capital into that and then iterate on that.

I wouldn’t list every product and then send them all in and then run out of stock because you make more work for yourself as the brand when you have to track ten products to make sure they’re in stock. You have to evaluate that many more campaigns and that many more to pay for those pages to be optimized. It’s not hard to optimize that Amazon product detail page, but it does take time. A lot of brands pay for someone to do that and that’s money they could have invested into a campaign that returns sales.

I think a lot of brands spread themselves too thin too soon, especially in regards to inventory. You don’t have to sell anything but your bestsellers on Amazon to start. A lot of brands have learned that the hard way and they keep relaunching. It can be frustrating because you tie up all your capital and investment into someone like me who makes the listing and you don’t get the product into the consumer’s hands. Your biggest asset is the actual product that you’re trying to sell.

It’s not that indifferent from what we talk about a lot to brands when we think of brick and mortar and that’s going narrow and deep. It’s somewhat following the Pareto principle where you simplify, and you do those kinds of things. That’s a message that I want entrepreneurs to hear as they think about how to be more capital-efficient. We talk a lot in this industry about you need X number of SKUs and you should be in that 3 to 5 SKU range at a minimum and build from there.

However, the reality is that SKUs add complexity. They add cost to inventory. They add cost in receivables and free fills. They add cost in optimizing Amazon pages, promotions, and so forth. Sometimes it’s like, “80% of my sales are coming from this product and if I go hard on this product or this variety pack, then I can simplify.” Again, I can stack the deck more in my favor.

I think anytime a brand can do that and they do it in other channels. That’s what’s so hard and back to my original point, many brands treat Amazon like it’s something so different and it’s not. It’s not rocket science because I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it if it was. It’s not that hard. It takes a lot of patience to sort it out. It might take longer than you want, but ultimately, you’ll be much more successful with it.

What’s next for you? Tell us a little bit more about Andy.

With the software, the big thing was I loved the agency life. I loved the variety of working with many brands. It was fun. It was always changing. I got to be a mini-advisor to so many brands. I worked with some brands for years and still do. What’s exciting about the software space and moving into this is it feels a little bit refreshing and new. It’s different. I’m doing things like email marketing campaigns. I’m trying to have a different mindset about what is customer acquisition.

We talked about that on Amazon and it’s very different than even client retention or looking for software partners. Data is a fun thing. Something that has been top of mind lately is a lot of the ChatGPT things are a fascinating crossover with both the Amazon world and the software game. What’s next for me is I love having 3 to 4 different present roles on my LinkedIn. I think that was always something that I’d love to do where you log onto my LinkedIn and I have 3 or 4 active jobs. I work part-time with all of them and I can dedicate myself to what needs focus at the current time.

That is fun to be a bit of a multitasker or a generalist. What lights your fire right now the most? You see things like ChatGPT and so forth. It’s such a crazy time. I don’t know what the hell’s going to happen with AI and all of those kinds of things. I was showing ChatGPT to my wife the other day and I said, “Write a story about Juliette, who was from Buffalo, New York, and married this cool, studly dude, Elliot. Write me five paragraphs.” I wrote it for her and I had to read it and she was completely wigged out by how real it seemed. AI can change all of this. Again, I’m asking you to be part clairvoyant. What’s the future?

I’m fascinated by it. I love it. As soon as news broke out about it, I was in there playing with it. I have done some cool stuff. I’ve used tools that use it. GPT-4 is coming out this summer. It’s all very fascinating. What’s interesting to me is what we a lot of people aren’t talking about, which is how we use this. A lot of people are afraid of it in terms of like, “It’s going to kill jobs. It’s going to change the world.” I don’t necessarily agree. I think that we may discount how much of our life is already automated and technical in a way where you can hand a toddler an iPhone and they can probably operate it better than 80% of the population.

As a grandfather, the children know more about their iPads than I do.

What’s fascinating to me about the innovation that’s coming is how we leverage it and what it does in the context of a healthy community and relationships for business. There are ways that ChatGPT is going to be massively abused and it has the potential to cause a lot of turmoil for people where we could eliminate jobs. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, but I think there are going to be a lot of things that it changes.

When someone has a mindset of, “How can I cause abundance with this?” I think that’s where we’re going to see a lot of good come out of it and a lot of positives. It’s similar to how the internet changed everything. When we have something like this, we take more of a long mindset view of it. ChatGPT-4 in the summer will be cool. It might be a little intimidating and scary because it can write an Amazon listing in seconds and that’s something where there are a lot of people in my industry, that’s their role but how can we do it better? How can we use it to make what we do better and faster? Taking that mindset is what fascinates me about it is looking at how we could change things and make things more effective with it and not only efficient.

It doesn’t threaten me, either. With every technology that’s been introduced that we’ve seen and certainly in my lifetime, I’ve seen technological advances that seem unfathomable then that are commonplace now. I remember how cool it was when I first started my career when my pager became a two-way pager and I could respond with a yes, no, or a maybe to my pages. When I got my first car phone, I’m like, “No one’s going to use these.” I remember going into the brick and I was so old when I went to college. I used to pay people to type my papers and now ChatGPT could write my paper for me.

There are unintended consequences to all of it and we see all of that routinely but there are generations now that are completely digitally native, and this is what they do. This is how they roll. It’s going to be interesting and I think as an entrepreneur, one of the things that I talk so much about is that innovation in entrepreneurship doesn’t start or stop with your product and your brand.

Innovation in entrepreneurship is being on the bleeding edge or the cutting edge of everything that you do in your business. The benefit of being an entrepreneurial brand is that you can take the risks and try the emerging and developing things that the bigger companies have to wait until they’re proven they are vetted or until there’s enough consensus.

As an entrepreneur, my encouragement is that you should be absorbing and reading all this stuff. You should be trying to stay current on what’s happening and talk to your more tech-evolved friends. Right now, I’m trying to get a group of our entrepreneurs to read a book alongside me called Adventure Finance, which is talking about different terms and different potential structures and ideas for fundraising.

It’s the same kind of thing. This could be an advantage. It could also be a mistake. I’m a big proponent of growth hacking here you take some calculated risks. I call them controlled experiments. You isolate a variable or two and you try this stuff because what happens otherwise is what we see too much of. I’m not trying to be negative or derive anybody’s efforts, but there’s a little bit of this lemming mentality, where a couple of people have success. A bunch of brands was having success on TikTok, so now I see every brand running to TikTok.

Years ago, people were having big success with the influencer so everyone was running towards that. The challenge with that is when you’re 2nd, 3rd, or 4th in line, your efforts will be higher for your rewards being lower. However, when you’re leaning in and trying new things, for example, ChatGPT, I would be thinking to myself, “What can I do with this? What can I do to have fun with it, discuss it, utilize it, and all of these kinds of things?” You’re a tech guy. You always have been. What’s your mindset?

I think the fad thing is real. It’s real with Amazon. I see this a lot with Amazon. Amazon rolls out new programs all the time and most of them fail. What works is going back to some tried and true things. There’s knowing when to evaluate if something’s the next big thing versus this is just a fad. There was a lot of buzz a few years ago about Snapchat being the thing that would take down Meta and Instagram. It cut into it. There have been other things that have factored into that as well and maybe that platform is TikTok that pushes it or maybe TikTok gets banned in the US and it completely changes or someone else comes out with something else that rivals it.

I think brands should focus on knowing what works and doing the fundamentals well. It’s like if you were playing a sport or playing a game, if you don’t know the fundamental rules of what works, you can’t take those calculated risks or test things because you might have a flaw in the system. You might have a flat tire that’s going to make it not work, and it’ll throw off everything. You’ll end up spending more time and effort.

What a lot of brands do is step back regularly. I try to do this by stepping back as an entrepreneur and saying, “What is working? What isn’t working? What do I need to change?” I think that’s something that I’m still trying to learn. I certainly have not mastered that, but it helps to have other people around you who will tell you, “This isn’t working.”

The other thing around that too, and this is a lesson for everyone, is you can try these things, but you have to think like a scientist. When a scientist runs an experiment, they have a hypothesis as to what the result of that experiment should be. Don’t try something unless you have a hypothesis of what the result should be because then you have no gauge as to whether it’s effective or not.

You don’t want to say, “This is cool. I’m going to try it and see what happens.” If it’s cool and it works, what does work mean? Does it mean that if I try this, my hypothesis is I should see $100,000 new in revenue? I should see more engagement. I should see more page views or whatever that measurement stick is because, in the absence of that, you are left with a nebulous attempt to try to understand if something’s working or not.

The risk of that kind of behavior is that and I love Gary Herzberg’s term. Entrepreneurs are pathologically optimistic, and it is so true. In most cases, it keeps us going forward in spite of everything pointing to the direction that we’re crazy about doing. We convince ourselves, “Maybe if I give it more time or I think this is working.” Be a scientist. Be a nerd and say, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to define the success of this if I spend X, I get Y or if I spend this much time, I get this in return.” That’s my hypothesis.

If you don’t get it, you can step back and ask, “Why didn’t I get this?” Were my expectations unrealistic? Should I be quantifying this or measuring this in a different way?” At least it creates this dialogue of investigation of curiosity. To your point, about what you were saying in general I think curiosity is such an important skillset too.

I see so many brands set forth or they have kind of the ideal, the hypothesis, and the test and learn and all of those things that we say all the time, but it’s true. I see a lot of brains fail with that because they’re not present with actually looking at that and being willing to admit, “This failed or this worked.” They’re only looking for what worked but won’t say, “This is what I failed and learned from it.” A lot of that is paying attention to the details of why didn’t it work.

I’ve seen it happen. If you’re working with any service provider or any advisor, how many brands I’ve seen get on the call and answer their email instead of listening to the expert they are paying to give them an opinion? It’s alarming how many brands don’t look at reports or they don’t look at the numbers to see what is working and they don’t ask the 2nd or 3rd level why did that change? It went up, but things like these macro events are generally not influencing emerging brands.

Generally, yes. There is seasonality or there are things that happen, but there are micro details that you need to pay attention to and that’s what you measure. You don’t measure seasonality or macroeconomic trends. Let other people do that. Emerging brands should focus on the micro-moments of their brand.

It’s the things that they control. I say this to entrepreneurs every day. If you’re expecting me to have the answers, I’m going to disappoint you. Even though I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, I am still absolutely a student of this industry. What I have and what I’ve learned is how to ask questions. If I could impart one skillset, one tool for entrepreneurs, it’s how to ask questions. It’s not to look at the data because this happens all the time. We look at data and we try to explain the data because we want to be able to explain it to the investors. We want to be able to explain it to stakeholders, retailers, or whomever.

I don’t care so much about how well you can explain the data. I want to know what questions are coming up to you from the data, whether it’s data from Amazon or other elements of your eCommerce strategy. Whether it’s syndicated data or your financial reporting, being able to look at those things and say, “What if these things didn’t happen? What if this happened? What are the questions I should investigate that’s going to serve you well?”

I looked at the watch and realized that we blew through this hour. We’ve got a couple of minutes left. I’ll give you two final questions. One is if you can impart any wisdom right now. If you want the entrepreneurs reading this to walk away from this episode with any new thing in their brains, what would that be? I’ll follow up with the second, and that is if they want to talk to you, learn more about you, etc., how do people get ahold of you?

I’ll speak to my main audience of brands who want to sell online or do it better. I would say, the number one piece of advice I would give you is to have someone in your close circle. If it’s not you or maybe you, have someone who can read the numbers and know the next questions to ask. That is the beauty of selling online, are you get such a shorter feedback loop of what is working and what’s not.

Find someone who can do it or find someone who can help you find that person. Also, talk to your competitors. Talk to other brands. Talk to people and always be seeking to find further understanding. Make that a key component of someone’s role on your team is how to evaluate that for online success because then you can answer, “It looks different for every brand.” You can answer, “How does this look different for my brand?” That would be the sole piece of advice.

I think that’s sage advice. How do people get ahold of you?

I’m on LinkedIn. Reach out to me. LinkedIn’s my favorite social media channel because it’s all business, just like all social media channels are business, which is why I like LinkedIn because it’s just about business. That’s the primary way. My email is [email protected]. I love to talk to brands. I love to talk to people in the industry who have questions. I’m always an open book. I love to make connections with folks. Please reach out.

I’ll reiterate that. Andy is very generous with this time and advice. You’ve been a supporter of ours, but more importantly, of emerging brands for as long as we’ve known each other. You are also one of the guys that I tapped into when the pandemic first shut down Expo West all those years ago when we started what we now tongue-in-cheek call the Natural Product Mafia. We pulled together the thinkers in the industry to brainstorm. We’ve been doing that now for a few years, and I’m grateful for that too.

Thank you for that. I think I entered into that as a young and naïve person entering my first pandemic, but it was everyone’s first pandemic or most of everyone. What that taught me, and I would say for anyone reading. Find a community of people who you can get on a Friday afternoon call with and talk about everything or nothing. That is so important as an entrepreneur. It’s probably the number one factor of what I see make or break brands. I know that’s not news to a lot of successful brands, but if you’re struggling or you’re asking for help, I think that’s what that group is for.

Community is the most important thing. It was an a-ha and learning for me, quite honestly. I’ll tell this quick story. I was part of a mastermind group for years and twice a year we would meet. Each time, we’d have a facilitated conversation or topic that we’d have to bring. Think of it as a YPO group or something like that. This particular one was in Toronto, Canada. It was years ago. We were supposed to come up with what we felt was the highest value activity we did to our constituency, and in our case, to our entrepreneurs and our brand.

I showed up there and everyone knows each other. We’ve been in these groups for a while. You can’t bullshit the bullshitters. I showed up there with my chest puffed out saying, “It’s our empathy-based approach to strategy.” They all looked at me and said, “No. You’re full of crap. It’s community. It’s the fact that you’re this vessel to bring entrepreneurs together in a safe space where they can drop the veneer and be vulnerable and realize that they’re not alone in this journey.”

I left that meeting a few days later and came back to our team and I said, “Everything that we do from now on is going to be focused on building, supporting, and creating the best community we can for these entrepreneurs because that’s exactly what I believe to be true.” Entrepreneurs are part of a community of collaborators and champions who have a safe place where they can show up and ask the questions they need, get the support they need, get the education they need, and find the access they need. They outperform the entrepreneurs who try to do it all on their own. Thanks for joining me. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next time at the show.

Important Links

• New Hope

• Expo East

• TIG Collective

• TIG Venture Community

• Mix Shift

• Walmart.com

• Instacart

• ChatGPT

• Adventure Finance

• LinkedIn – Andy Thompson

• [email protected]

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