I've made over $10 million selling my passion product on Amazon and we're going to tell you what Dakota sells on Amazon and his product is really unique it's unlike anything else you've seen we're also going to show you step by step how Dakota built a business that does over $10 million a year on Amazon and we're going to share everything all his startup cost his product cost and his final profit but make sure you stay till the end of the video because at the end of this video Dakota is going to share with you the three biggest mistakes he made and these mistakes cost him over $100,000 dollar so Dakota tell us what do you sell on Amazon and how didd you get started I sell emergency food storage supplies uh my main audience is doomsday preppers homesteaders and people that just want to have an emergency storage of food at their house and how do you know about this opportunity to sell on Amazon I worked at Amazon for 5 years and in that time I was working for Amazon advertising I was seeing all these Brands grow so quickly and it gave me the idea that hey maybe I can do this for myself I imagine you were making good money at Amazon why not just stay with your Amazon job why quit and take that risk I didn't want to be stuck in a 9 to-5 job I wanted to have freedom I'm going to have you share with us step by step how you did it but before Dakota does that make sure to smash the like button he's going to give so much freaking value in this video hit that like button but tell us step by step for the audience at home how did you find your product how did you find your manufacturer how did you launch and also tell us like how much all these different things cost because I know it can be expensive so how' you start how do you find your product so I was doing research and I've always been uh an avid camper how hi ER I'm a big cook and I was starting to look at doing something in the camping category cuz I just couldn't think of so many Brands when I go into REI a lot of the brands seemed pretty boring I'd heard other sellers using jungle Scout while I was at Amazon so I installed jungle Scout and I started doing some research on Jungle Scout and by scrolling in that category I quickly started to pick up on the volume of some of these preparedness supplies was much higher a lot of people are buying these preparedness supplies but there's not really a lot of sellers there's not really good products in that category is that correct exactly there wasn't one company that had a brand I would call it and I was like that's when the light bulb went off of me being like I could be that brand how much did you spend on Jungle Scout $200 in my first year so 200 bucks in order to find a product on Amazon that's not bad and the next step after you find your product that a lot of people don't think about and you started talking about is designing the product designing the brand designing the logo how much did that cost and how did you design your brand your logo your packaging all that but I actually a little bit of a mistake was I went on upwork and I tried to do it super cheap and that probably was like $250 wasted and then I decided to go on Instagram actually and I typed in packaging design and packaging designer and a lot of uh creatives post their portfolios on Instagram and I found a really great outdoor packaging designer and that packaging designer basically connected with me and it was about $2,000 total for three SKS to get everything the next fact Factor when starting an Amazon business is all the legal parts of starting your business whether you do a DBA or an LLC and for people at home DBA stands for doing business as and LLC is limited liability company and did you do a DBA or an LLC when you started your business yeah so when I first started the business we immediately got an LLC it separates your personal assets from your business assets which is really important how much did the LLC cost you it was about $500 the next step when selling on Amazon is actually to get your product manufactured and let's talk about how did you find a man ufacturer for this product yeah so I did what a lot of people do I went to Alibaba as my first stop and there's actually a really big mistake at this stage that we'll talk about later I think mistake that cost you around $100,000 but you found your manufacturer and you wanted to get a sample how much did that first sample cost you yeah so that first sample actually cost me nothing and for people wondering we still haven't even actually said what your product is are you willing to share what your product is now I have seven Brands you know but uh one of my largest Brands is still wabby Goods which is a long-term food storage solution and our main skew is myar bags and essentially you take dry food you put them inside the bag with an oxygen absorber which we also sell and you're able to seal it and the food will last anywhere from 25 to 30 years it has the oxygen absorbers inside of the product it comes with the myar bags it comes with labels um everything you need to get started so at this point you're ready to do your first production run how much did that cost I was aggressive I have an agency I had worked at Amazon I really understood you know that and felt that I had a niche in the market that wasn't currently being explored so I invested $50,000 in my first production run across three SKS you spent 50 Grand on manufacturing were you scared whether or not they would actually produce the product cuz that's a lot of money and it's a lot of trust yeah totally like looking back I was like probably just like really stupid for doing that to be honest uh you know like I had never I didn't have a sourcing agent at that time I had never gone to this Factory to see if they were legit I uh pretty much blind trusted them now before anything sent to me from China we have third party inspectors go and check the product once you have your product manufactured you have to get it shipped over into the United States into the Amazon warehouse did you have it shipped to you first or straight into the Amazon warehouse yeah so at that volume that we ordered at initially like we filled an entire container of product you know so you see like a giant Freight container going down the highway or at like the sea port that's how much stuff we ordered so you ended up shipping it directly from China into the US Amazon FBA warehouse and there's a couple more steps one of them is creating your Amazon listing how much did it cost for you to create your Amazon listing the photos and all that and talk us through that process yeah so I had my agency already and basically it costs us nothing because we have the resources that's what we do for our partners every single day one thing to remember when selling on Amazon is that Amazon is a search engine people go to Amazon to search for products that they want to buy and that's where you want to make sure you have the keywords the search phrase in your title once people search in Amazon they have a list of a bunch of products and the only way they know which product they're going to click on is based on the main image and or at least that's the main thing that they're looking at so you want to make sure you have a main image that pops that stands out that convert that conveys value and shows that you have a premium product so how much money did you make in your first month selling on Amazon in the first couple days we were instantly selling a couple hundred in sales and we like we're just running a little bit of PPC but like not a ton through the ads portal but Amazon gives you what a lot of people call the honeymoon period when you launch a product so it basically pushes traffic to your page in order to see like is this going to be a good product or is it going to be like a dud product and if you fail on that like honeymoon period a lot of times like you don't you're not crushed like it's not the end of the world but if you like succeed in that honeymoon period like I've seen a lot of products catapult through rank very quickly so like we picked up algorithmically because like we had something that was different than what was actively in the market and that led us to a lot of success so hundreds of dollars a day in sales quickly went to thousands of dollars a day in sales within the same month we did about $31,000 in sales our first month and something to keep in mind is sales or Revenue numbers isn't profit and we're going to break down all the different costs associated with selling on Amazon and share what Dakota's actual profit was in his first month so one of the biggest fees when selling a product on Amazon is your product cost you have to you have to buy the products that you're selling on Amazon in your first month uh the total cost of the products you sold I think was around like like $7,000 another fee that we have when selling on Amazon is the 15% Amazon selling fee how much money did you have to pay for that in the first month yeah so the selling fee was like just under $5,000 and you Amazon takes a lot of fees I think that's like the one thing that you always got to be aware of is what's the fee going to be but Amazon warrants that fee right because they give you access to 300 million plus Amazon Prime Shoppers and Amazon Prime Shoppers love spending money on Amazon there's also the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee and for people that don't know FBA stands for fulfilled by Amazon and this is where you send the products that you want to sell on Amazon's website into their warehouse and when you get an order Amazon will pick pack and ship it out to the customer but you do have to pay a fee for that and I mean keep in mind if you were selling products without Amazon FBA you'd have to pay for postage and handling anyways how much did you spend on this Amazon FBA fee probably like around $6,000 total for that month another thing that's important to add in you know is the size of your products right so oversized products are going to add more fees we'll get into that a little bit later but uh PPC is also you know a really important how much yeah how much did you spend on PPC yeah so I typically am very aggressive with PPC you know um paperclick ads and those all are keyword-based ads so if someone types in you know myar bag you know my product will come up like almost 100% of the time I think it was about $6,200 and something that's crazy is the next month you actually ended up doing $90,000 in revenue and we're going to break down those numbers and explained how he did that in just a second but there are three really important things that the coda did in his first month that set him up for success and the first one is you started working on new products right away what was your thinking behind that we launched the three SKS and then I had I think about four or five other SKS that I like had in the pipeline but I decided to say hey like let's let's wait which ended up being like smart since I had kept those items in the queue you know and I saw that success you know those Thousand Days pretty quickly I knew I had something and it allowed me much more quickly to launch you know those ancillary products the second thing that you did was starting to work with influencers talk about that and and how much did that translate into sales yeah that's a great Point that's so when I started the agency and while I was at Amazon I realized that brands that were using what I called Omni Channel marketing uh were growing the fastest people are on YouTube they're on like Instagram reels they're on like Tik Tok right checking their emails like doing all these various things like I need to have touch points in those areas where they're spending all this time to educate those customers and so how would you recommend people at home interact with and find influencers we just started reaching out to influencers within our niche of uh people that love to Camp people that love preparedness uh people that knew a lot about the outdoors and a lot of these people just post on Instagram because it's a passion for them they're not really thinking about it like as a business and they like oh maybe one day when I get like 100,000 followers someone will reach out to me but we said like why don't we reach out to people that are really good at making content that have even 5,000 followers or 10,000 followers or 15 like some some Market traction on the fact that they're making good content and then see their engagement rate on the content that they're making we'd reach out to them and just say like hey we love your content we'd love to send you free product you know it's a product that they theoretically are already interested you know in purchasing when we made really funny reels and got like really strong engagement on those reels Amazon sales started to accelerate really quickly because we were educating again through Omni Channel marketing people before they got to Amazon and then when they got to Amazon they weren't like price conscious they wanted to buy from our brand you know in the category and the third thing that you did that we'll talk about before we get into the month two numbers is you started a Shopify page right away from month one and since then you've done over $12 million on this Shopify page what was your thinking like why why start it right away why not wait what inspired you yeah to do it right away I realized that Amazon holds a lot of data right at the end of the day like they own their customers and Bezos has built this amazing Mo you know around them owning basically everything but I wanted to build the ownership of my customer base so now you know we have about 300,000 emails you know on our Shopify store and it's doing really sizable Revenue because we can also do offers on Shopify that we can't really Implement on Amazon we'll send out uh deals and coupons to our loyal customers we have a point system and we're also sending out a lot of newsletters and uh guides about how they can most effectively use our products uh but what I really like about the emails is that when I launch a new product now I instantly have reach to a lot of loyal customers that love our products and in your second month you did over $9,000 in sales and when we subtract out the product cost the Amazon selling fee the Amazon FBA cost and all the other costs there was one fee that increased this month and that was Amazon PPC and why was that yeah we just we wanted to spend a lot of money to get our rank up really quickly and I knew that even though I might be spending at a onet toone return which is essentially a net loss my rank my reviews everything would climb very quickly and once I reached that Plateau I'd be able to pull back and be more profitable but I would reap the reward even if there's a slight drop in sales to continue that velocity at some level so it was marketing spend you spend a bunch of money up front knowing that maybe it's not as profitable but you're you're growing the brand you're you're increasing your rank you're doing everything to make it so down the line you'll have the biggest business possible exactly and it worked in month three you did over $135,000 Revenue in just one month and then again once we subtract all all the product cost I I think this month you actually technically lost a little bit of money how did you feel about that I feel good and bad about it right I think it's good in that like we saw a huge growth in Revenue yeah um and I felt very confident that way our product was jelling with the market but you know profit was lower I knew I had to get things back on track in month four your numbers it was almost $200,000 Revenue you did over $190,000 Revenue in your fourth month ever selling this product on Amazon uh and you know once we subtract out all the fees you actually did make a profit this month of around $8,000 how are you feeling at this point so the new products were able to pick up the Steam on the products that I had invested so much in in advertising and that's again the first month that we really we're profitable month one but then for two months we're unprofitable and then we broke back into that profitability range which I was really happy about and it worked out even though you had two months where you weren't profitable by the end of the year how much money in Revenue did this business do so the end of the year we did just over $1 million so it's like 1.1 million which you know we're really happy about and then after we subtract out the product costs the Amazon fees all the PPC I know you spent a lot on PPC what was the the final profit after your first year it was about $85,000 you know which like a lot of people would be like but like for me like that was killer right because like I knew at that point I would be able to pull a lot of levers to drive even more profit into the business and continue to scale and it paid off to date with this one business you've done over $14 million in sales again once we subtract out all the cost how much profit have you done just with this one business on Amazon we'll talk about the Shopify numbers in a second how much profit it's been about 2 $1 million in profit we just did our books recently and how much profit have you done with Shopify with Shopify total profits been about 2.5 2.6 million so with just this one Amazon business you've done over $5 million on profit with Amazon and Shopify but there was three really big mistakes that you made and make sure to pay attention because Dakota made these mistakes so that you don't have to and the first mistake cost you over $100,000 and this was the mistake we kept talking about which was the packaging size what was the issue there we allowed the factory to essentially make their own size of the packaging and it should have been smaller and when then oversiz you get charged in incremental fees so it's just way too big cost us so much money it could have been a way smaller and I could have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars if I had just had slightly smaller packaging the second mistake that Dakota made cost him another $100,000 and this is a a question I get all the time is how do you protect yourself legally if you're manufacturing your product over China and I know you have a little bit of a horror story around this but you learned some really good lessons tell us about this yeah long story short I had the innovation of packaging the oxygen absorbers in sets of 10 normally there's since sets of 100 I went to China started kind of pitching the idea I had to make a little illustration and almost no one could do it like I talked to probably 50 factories and then finally I found one that really understood I started working with them they sent me samples it was great started selling as I said the velocity went quick the factory obviously looks at Amazon too you know they're going to want to see how the product they're making is selling I'm sure saw that it was selling well and saw that I was reordering fairly quickly with a very aggressive initial po as we've discussed and then they started selling the exact same product on Amazon and I was like this is very strange this packaging this branding everything is way too similar to mine the time frame of it being similar to mine is very odd they sold uh you over $100,000 worth of that product you know that they said they weren't going to ever sell and I had to threaten legal action against that factory now I always protect myself before I start selling anything on Amazon how do you protect yourself and how can people at home protect themselves you can do things that are very specific to prot number oneing your sign a Chinese NDA you can a Chinese attorney you can find a Chinese attorney on upwork or via Google search they're an attorney that's actually licensed in China China has an extremely robust legal system which is very interesting and it's much cheaper to deal with legal matters in China than it is to deal with them in the US draft that NDA that an NDA prohibits the factory from disclosing either that they work with your brand or to give out the proprietary construction of your product the next one you're going to want is an nnn agreement like literally the letter N three times and it basically prohibits the factory from making that exact configuration for any other company and if they do at that point they're rocked if they get found out or you sue them in court uh their entire bank account can get frozen off of this they can get prohibited from getting lines of credit which is very important for running the factory they can get freezes on hiring any people like they take that very seriously but if you're this uneducated seller that has no none of these understandings of like the legal system all the proceedings blah blah they're going to take advantage of you day one like I did so always protect yourself and getting an nnn can be relatively affordable do you have any idea how much it would like on super cheap it's like that's like maybe $100 $200 and the third mistake and probably the biggest mistake that Dakota made and the biggest mistake I see pretty much everyone making you probably are already making this mistake right now is waiting to start his business this one mistake probably cost him over a million dollars talk about that and and give some advice to people at home on how to avoid waiting yeah I think a big thing I've learned is you have to believe in yourself and believe in what you're capable of uh because if you don't believe in yourself no one else is going to believe in you and you have to be willing to take risks in order to reap rewards uh I saw all these people at Amazon while I was working there building Brands scaling Brands didn't have more intelligence or anything than I had you know but we're Scrappy we're willing to get their feet wet willing to learn and scale so I knew that if I started applied myself got my scars and got stronger I'd be able to you know build a large brand so don't wait to start your own Amazon business I have a free eight hour step-by-step course that you can get by just clicking right here so click on that video see you in the next video and thanks for watching
