The Power of Storytelling in Marketing, YouTube, and TikTok Shop Success [YouTube Marketing with AJ Rantz, Part 6]

Transcript

I was a bartender for 10 years. Then this little thing called COVID hit. The job that I thought I was going to take at the time, that was no longer available. I started applying to every single job you could think of. People hiring, they look to me and they’re like, look outside. There’s literally hundreds of people here applying for this job. We could hire whoever we want. Yeah, that hit hard, man. I was months away from losing my house.

Like we had no money left. I started pursuing ways to kind of make money myself. I tested and experimented with every single piece of content you could put out there. I was posting every single day, two to three videos a day for over three months and no one cared. I started making that the content.

Three videos in, a video goes viral. That video got over 600,000 views, which led to over $22,000 in pre-sales that day. You can purchase cocktail cards right on my video. If there’s ever a time to launch a product, we’re in a gold rush era.

Welcome back to another episode of the niche marketing podcast. As always, I’m your host, John Bertino, founder and CEO of The Agency Guide, headquartered in Philadelphia. If you’re upset, dissatisfied with your marketing agency and most people are, please give us a shout.

We represent hundreds of marketing agencies across the US and beyond. We’d be happy to consult with you on your needs and see if we can help find you the right fit. Very excited for today’s guest, Mr. AJ Rantz.

AJ has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, YouTube videos averaging well over 10,000 views or more per video and has successfully launched a product-based business doing well over a million dollars a year in revenue. That’s exactly what we want to talk to AJ about today. How do you leverage social media success to build a successful CPG product?

AJ is a wealth of knowledge on this subject and that’s why we’re so stoked to have him. AJ, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. Glad to talk some business with you today. Yeah, 100%. That’s exactly it, right? Because it’s one thing to be a creator. We support creators and are passionate about the process of being a content creator ourselves. But at the end of the day, it really is about business, at least for most of us.

You have that unique one-two combination of having been through the creator experience journey, what have you, had great success, but also figured out how to successfully launch a product on the back of that. And so that’s what we’re going to dive into. But before we get into the nooks and crannies of that, let’s start a little bit with your origin story. You’ve built a seven-figure brand from scratch.

How did you get the idea for cocktail cards in the first place? And what did you do to turn that into a reality? Wow. Okay, that’s a big question. That’s a long, long journey. We got time. Honestly, it really started. I was a bartender for 10 years. And me and my now wife, we bought a house together and we wanted to think of ways to be around each other a little bit more. So I was looking at other ways to get out of bartending, and I was actually taking some time off of bartending and try and find another job. And then this little thing called COVID hit. And my backup plan would always be there as bartending. I can always get a good gig bartending. I’m good at it.

The money will always be there. And I live in Seattle, and I don’t know if you remember, but when COVID hit, Seattle was one of the hubs for COVID. It was the main place where it hit. So, the whole city shut down. The job that I thought I was going to take at the time, that was no longer available. That company pulled all their new jobs. So, I was like, ah crap, let’s go back to bartending. Every single bar in the city shut down.

So, the only thing that was really available at that time was maybe takeout food, which a couple of restaurants were doing, which rendered me, what’s the word, completely useless. So, I started applying to every single job you could think of. Every single job that popped up on Monster, LinkedIn, you named it. And I got denied every single job. I went to hundreds of interviews. Every single job interview I went to; there were hundreds of people there.

It was insane. And I even got; this is sort of one of the latter interviews I went to. These two people hiring, they looked at me and they’re like, look outside. There’s literally hundreds of people here applying for this job. We can hire whoever we want. You, you’re just a bartender. Like, oh, what are we doing here? And yeah, yeah, that hit hard, man. Talk about making me feel like I was at rock bottom, which it did that one, that one stung a little bit, but it triggered something in my mind where I realized if I was going to make money, it was going to be up to me to go generate that money somehow.

So, I started pursuing ways to kind of make money myself, be a little more self-sustainable. I did the dreaded how to make money online Google search led me nowhere. It let me down a lot of rabbit holes that wasted my time, wasted my money. Not a lot of good advice when you directly do that search, but started to notice little ways of legitimate businesses that were running and operating online. Started to dive into YouTube a little bit more and eventually found a couple of things.

I don’t want to make the story too long. I don’t want to bore any, a lot of people, but I dove into two main things I saw other people making money and that was affiliate marketing and Amazon FBA were like the two kind of big ones that popped up and I was like, okay, I could do that.

The problem with Amazon FBA is that requires money. That requires a product that requires a lot of things that I have zero clue how to do. The affiliate marketing, wow, they make it seem really easy because these guys are making YouTube videos and they’re making a thousand dollars a day.

I think I’ll go try that. Then I kind of pursued that a little bit. I did make a little bit of money through the affiliate marketing, but then I was kind of open to the big scheme that was kind of going on. Those people making a thousand dollars a day, they were referring you to $2,500 courses and that’s what they were, they were getting a thousand-dollar commission and that’s what they were kind of claiming.

Let me jump in right there. You said you made a little bit of money as an affiliate. Was that your first foray into posting content online consistently? If so, what were you posting and how? Yeah, it was definitely the first thing that motivated me to create content. One of the affiliate courses that I was in, they were challenging people to get on TikTok because no one really knew who it was. You could compete on TikTok without followers. It got me intrigued.

I went on there and I tried TikTok for a little bit. It actually resulted. I remember the first time I got a 73-cent commission. I was like, “Holy crap, a video I made 73.” It felt like a million bucks, man, especially with how little money I had back then. It definitely felt like I won the lotto. When I kind of looked deeper and deeper into the affiliate thing, if I wanted to promote the products that I wanted to promote, I knew all the affiliate commissions were going to be really small and I was going to have to have a big following on social media for that to really make sense.

But seeing the process work made me kind of connect two dots together. They’re like, “If I do create my own product, I can leverage my own social media using things like TikTok and this sort of platform that’s easy for beginners like me to jump in and kind of share my story and leverage it to launch my own product.” A lot of this stuff was happening around the same time. I was kind of doing the affiliate stuff and I was also kind of working on this project for Cocktail Cards.

I was in another course for Amazon FBA where the person was really big on not copying products, but coming to market with your own unique product, something you were passionate about, something you knew a lot about, and leveraging a unique place on Amazon. I love that idea. If I was going to launch something, I wanted it to be special, unique, solving a problem that isn’t already being solved. I wanted to connect the two together.

Honestly, at that point, after kind of seeing a little glimpse of the social media work with the affiliate stuff, I was all in on taking social media and completely building my brand on social media. That’s kind of where the two dots connected. I was no longer chasing my tail. I finally had a mission, a goal, and the rest is kind of history there. Okay. One thing that’s already bubbled up to the surface in the six or seven interviews we’ve done so far in this series with other content creators, most of them YouTube focused, is that if you’re not very, if not deeply passionate about the subject matter or genuinely enthused by it, it’s really hard to be consistent and make it succeed.

That might seem like an obvious point, but the fact that you went right into something where you were having fun and made a pretty quick pivot away from stuff that you were just maybe selling or pitching to make money and knew that you wanted to be something that you could get emotionally invested in, that was a, I would wager a key distinction, a key move you made that likely had a lot to do with the success.

But let’s talk about that. So, okay. So, you were a bartender, and I gather that you enjoy spirits or wine or beer from time to time. Did you, had you forayed or looked into teaching others bartending at any point or had you thought about a bartending class or course, or was it at this moment where you were like, okay, maybe I should create a product that can teach others how to make drinks. Cause that’s what cocktail cars is.

We should tell the folks. Yeah, absolutely. It’s, so here’s, here’s my thought process on the product versus my time teaching cocktails and stuff like that. Obviously the market was unique at that point. Bars and restaurants were shutting down all across the country. So, there was a desire to learn how to make cocktails at home, but there wasn’t a lot of great products out there that really instruct on how to do it.

So of course, doing a bartending class would obviously make sense, but you’re very limited with your time. So for every class that I’m teaching that requires, you know, an hour, two hours, three hours of my time in order to do that, I wanted something where I could scale a little bit bigger because when you’re in a situation where I was in, where man, like I was months away from losing my house.

Like we had no money left. Like we were toast. I didn’t want to be in that position again. So, I wanted to be able to start a business that I can grow and scale and pour, you know, my heart and soul into, to outreach the value of my time. So, if I’m just teaching these, these classes, you’re probably going to be limited how many people join the classes.

It obviously, you’re limited by how many people even know the class exists and want to sign up to do the classes and all that type of stuff. And then of course, I’m limited by the hours I’m putting in towards these classes. So, I really want to focus on a physical product and do that. I did a little bit of both. I have done online classes, and I gave away some online classes that I did for initial investors into cocktail cards, which we could talk about that first, how I was able to afford a business when I had no money. But you’re exactly right.

It was something I was passionate about. I could work towards, but the whole reason why I decided to go with the cards, and a physical product was because it was something that I could scale and turn into a big multi-million-dollar business. I just didn’t see the vision of that happening doing virtual classes and stuff like that. Yeah. Another thoughtful insight you had there on the difficulty in scaling your own time.

I know a lot of creators and folks that run courses do run into that. So another good move and just in case folks haven’t completely connected the dots yet, please give the 30 second, 60 second pitch on what a precisely cocktail cards is and who’s buying this product. Yeah. So, these are cocktail cards. They’re basically flashcards. So, there’s a hundred different flashcards in here and we have a bunch of stuff on the cards.

I’m not sure if it’ll be able to focus well here on my fancy camera with the auto focus, but it’s a hundred different cards covering a lot of different spirits and stuff like that. And a lot of these are most of the most popular recipes. Some of them are my own choice. I surveyed thousands of people to ask if you were to learn any drinks, what would you want to learn at home?

And we whittled them down to a hundred of the most popular and then a couple I threw in that are my own recipes. And we have the different drinks. I looked up the history of every single cocktail. So sort of some fun stuff to look, look at. On the back, I have the full recipe. So obviously you need the recipe of what you’re going to make. One of the hardest things for people was there’s a bunch of recipes online, but what, what do you do with it?

Like, how do you make that drink with the recipe? So, I actually wrote down step by step, the instructions of all the different drinks, stirring, shaking, some drinks you steak, you shake longer, some drinks, you roll, some drinks, you stir for a long time. Some drinks, you whip shake, right? They’re all, they’re all little, really fine-tuning things to make drinks taste just like a bartender would make them.

So, I went through all 100 drinks and really specialize in that also included all the tools, the glassware and stuff you’ll need. So I made it as dummy proof as possible because I’m a visual learner. So, I put a lot of care into visual learners with these. And then, since I was already doing social media and showing people a lot of these recipes online already, some of my audiences were like, you should link the videos you’re doing to the cards.

That way doesn’t have to go to your TikTok and search them or your YouTube and search them every single time. And that was brilliant. Cause that ended up being one of the most like favorite part of these cards. So, I have a QR code to every single drink. So, you can just scan it with your phone, boom, a video pops up. If you don’t know how to sugar a rim for your lemon drop, pull up the video, boom, I’ll walk you through exactly how to do it. So, um, it is a full step by step, how to make all your favorite cocktails at home exactly as a bartender would make it simplified to where anyone could follow along.

Uh, mostly popular with people with home bars, also really popular with bar and restaurant owners who use these as training tools for their bartenders as well. So kind of a lot of multi purposes for these things. They’re awesome. They’re really good looking. It’s a beautiful product you’ve developed for someone that’s only, you know, cause it’s only been really a couple of years now, right?

Four years, maybe five years. You’ve really developed something, not only thoughtful and innovative, but beautiful to look at. And as a career marketer, I’m really impressed by that. So how many iterations did it take to get to this current design and what was the process in figuring that part out? I would say big iterations were probably around five on fine tuning the designs and everything.

Um, it started pretty raw. I mean, the original designs pretty darn close. I have here, maybe we’ll, we’ll talk about my, my story of doing my Kickstarter, but this is my first sample, which is literally sticker paper that I had the UPS store printout for me. And I threw it on some old box samples that, uh, a manufacturer sent me for free. And it’s pretty close to that original design, but just with some fine tweaks and things that have added to the box and stuff like that.

I did hire a designer in Europe who I saw some of his previous work and I thought it was just absolutely beautiful. And I thought it would be perfect for this product. And you know, I even went through the whole step. I drew up my dream avatar. Who’s going to be the one shopping for these? And I was like, okay, I want these to be masculine.

I want them to look like the cool guy wants to impress his friends who can make an old fashioned at home. And they’re going to pull up this super dark filigree, New Orleans style box. And it turns out, you know, 75% of my audience is females and most of the people that buy my product are women. Um, so I totally missed the boat, but I think it’s because a lot of them get them as gifts and stuff like that.

And, uh, yeah, my designer did a great job. And one of the things that was absolutely crucial in the process of these was every design element I got every time I had an iteration from my designer, I went straight to my audience on TikTok, and I posted it. Um, I had a lot of people on TikTok. I was directing him into a Facebook group at the time. It was a launch group, and I was just throwing feedback.

So, every single design element on every single card on the box, you name it, I ran it through the audience, got their feedback before really, uh, initiating that change and moving on to the next iteration. So, um, it was, it was a fun way to build the product in front of people but also get their feedback on what they would want before I ever even had it made. Let’s give a shout out to that Facebook group.

What Facebook group were you a part of that allowed you to get that great feedback? Yeah, it was mine. So I made my own Facebook group. Yeah. So early on, on, on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook, the only place I would direct people to the only link I had was to join my Facebook launch group where you’ll be note, you’ll be the first notified when these go live on Indiegogo or Kickstarter, whatever my crowdfunding is. And they’ll also be a part of the process of creating the cards. So, a lot of people were kind of excited about that. I’ll be honest.

Most of the group was like friends and family and stuff like that in the very beginning. Like I was not popular. And I think we’ll talk about early numbers on TikTok. It was sad and pathetic and, and, uh, not good, but eventually once I started sharing stuff and sharing my story and talking about the product itself, things started to turn around and the group sort of picked up a little bit. But I think that initial Facebook group was only like 600 people or so.

Okay. So, to get to, to, to mass produce something like that, to make the, to get the beautiful packaging done right and go through those various iterations takes some startup capital. So it sounds like Kickstarter was how you went about getting that and bring us back to the time and place of where you were facilitating that.

I would imagine if you’re using Kickstarter and you’re just getting going pandemics, probably still going, uh, that must have been a bit of a, uh, a gut-wrenching experience. I’d imagine. Terrifying. It was sort of one of those things where, you know, my back was so far against the wall. There was no place before it, whether I was going to take one step or 20. I didn’t know it was going to happen regardless.

So, you know, I was really, really set on doing a Kickstarter. I ended up messing up my Kickstarter listing the night before. So I ended up spending all night, uh, creating an Indiegogo listing. So I ended up doing my campaign on Indiegogo, which actually, thank goodness I did. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but, uh, that was the platform I use. They’re honestly, they’re, they’re the same Indiegogo Kickstarter. They’re pretty much the same. And the way I was able to pull this off was I had my designer give me a quote and his quote was $3,400 because it’s a lot of cards, a hundred cards.

He had to design a box, a logo, uh, some, some additional marketing stuff. So the package was around 3,400 bucks. I had nowhere. I had none of that, maybe a couple hundred bucks in my name. So I wanted to do this, this Kickstarter, but I knew for it to be successful. I needed some type of imaging, some type of example to show people. And so my designer gave me a sample logo. This isn’t the super final logo, but it is a sample of the logo. He did a quick box design, and he gave me a couple of cards as a sample, rough sample of the cards.

So, I went to UPS and basically asked them if they could print this out on sticker paper for me and they said, sure, we could do it for a couple bucks. I was like, awesome. So they printed the box design, a couple of these card designs. See if I have any more in here, probably have, there we go. A couple, a couple, a couple different card designs.

And I had a manufacturer who I’ve been getting samples from because it’s good to sample different textures, materials, stuff like that before you actually go through the process of ordering. Sure. Yeah. So I had a lot of these blank products here, leftover from old projects that they did.

They sent me a bunch of different thickness of cards and stuff. It was free, but it was like 50 bucks to get it all shipped to me and stuff. So, I took these samples they gave me, took the sticker paper and just like cut it out with scissors, stuck it on the cards and use this as my first prototype for my IndieGoGo video.

So if you actually go to my IndieGoGo campaign, you’ll see a video of me and my friends doing a video using the cards. And they’re very obviously not the best quality, but it was good enough to make the video and get the sort of hype around it going. And again, probably 90% of the people that pitched in were already in that Facebook group.

So, the people that were giving the feedback along the way, helping out and getting excited for the product to launch, they were the ones who initially supported. And I was able to raise about 30, actually it was $3,200 for the design. And I was able to raise $3,400 with my campaign. And so that was enough to get the final design of all the cards, the logo, and then the box as well.

Exactly. Yes. And I had about $200 left over, which was about exactly what it would cost for me to get a full sample of the product made by the manufacturer. Got it. You were able to order just one. Yeah. Because for them to get together all the materials to put all their machinery and everything together to make one product, it’s pretty expensive if you’re just going to do one.

Exactly. The more you order, the lower your cost gets. So do a one sample. It’s pricey. It was like 200 bucks, but you have no choice in the matter. It is really, really good idea to always get samples of your products before you ever get them manufactured. Okay. And let’s talk about nailing product positioning. How did you have the confidence in a crowded market that you would be able to stand out with this product?

What was it you saw that looked like weakness in other people’s offerings versus what you were doing? Here’s the thing. There were no other offerings. So, it was a wide-open market. I had some software. I had these two softwares called Helium 10 and Jungle Scout, which allow you to be able to search keywords and volume and stuff on Amazon in particular.

And I was searching for cocktail recipe cards on there and search platform stuff like that. It was not high, but there was no competition. It was really meeting that market. There were some cocktail books out there, but again, they weren’t really solving the problem of teaching someone how to use the equipment, how to make a drink. It was more, let’s say cocktail books are probably a little bit more towards the professional, someone who knows how to make a cocktail, someone who maybe has bartending experience or who is already an enthusiast.

Those are where a lot of those books tend to lean. There was nothing that was very beginner friendly, a little bit more compact and easier to use like a flashcard. So for me, I had the confidence going in there. The only thing I was a little nervous about was that there just wasn’t a whole lot of search volume, maybe 800, 900 people a month searching for this stuff.

If I’m kind of stretching the keywords a little bit, I’m not just searching cocktail recipe cards. I’m searching homemade cocktails, cocktail mixers, stuff like that. Learn this, learn that. Exactly. Of course, maybe even. Yeah, yeah. So, I was trying to be a little creative in there, but I knew I was going to be the first to the market with this particular thing. I’m not that I’m the first one to ever create cocktail flashcards.

Sure, people have done it in the past, but currently there just wasn’t really anything like it on the market. Yeah. You know, funny enough, I’m a big believer in learning things through flashcards. I developed, I started doing that in my late teens, I guess through college and stuff. I would go to the gym from time to time or walk on the treadmill and go through cards I made for myself. And then at one point I did go to bartending school. Okay. I think they had us make flashcards and I had a great deck of my homemade bartending cocktail recipe flashcards.

And you know, I never let them go because kind of like you, it was always the if shit hits the fan. Exactly. And all else goes south. This, I’ll just go back to bartending. Of course, wasn’t planning on a pandemic and I’ve kept those cocktail cards, my own homemade version in the drawer for 30 years. And I think I still have them to this day. That is awesome.

Yeah. I remember writing, you know, all my, that’s how I learned as a bartender in the very beginning was writing flashcards and I threw mine away because as I started bartending and getting better at cocktails, I looked at the recipes and they were just like, where did I get these recipes? They’re awful. So many of them were wrong. So, I kind of threw them away, but they were really good for the essential learning.

Like, you know, what’s in a Manhattan, what’s in an old-fashioned sort of thing. And then, and then once you got the core base down, all the extra ones, it just, they didn’t really pop up that much behind a bar unless, unless they were popular at that bar, in which case you have to learn them on the spot anyway. But yeah, that’s kind of funny. I think everyone who bartended probably had at least a couple flashcards hanging around from, from when they were still learning.

That’s how I used to do it. I love how you’ve elevated it to the interactive experience, the videos online, also the way you shake it and stir it and all of these little details, which make a huge difference. So let’s get back to the online portion of this. So, you have your prototype and at this point, then what I would imagine you go to, you hit social media, and you hit it hard. Is that right?

Yeah, here’s the thing. It’s a little, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m hyped because I did raise that money on Indiegogo. But the truth is most of that money was friends and family contributing friends and family, seeing what I was going through. You got to bucko, go chase your dreams. We’re here to help, you know, and there was a handful of people, probably YouTube was my biggest platform at that time.

I think I had two, 3000 followers and I had a couple of videos doing well and you know, there were a handful of people that jumped in, but as far as the social media was going, I was not doing very well. And tick talk was a complete and utter disaster at this point. I was posting every single day, two to three videos a day for over three months. So we’re, we’re looking at hundreds and hundreds of videos that I posted. And I had 135 followers averaging probably 20 to 50 views a video in tick talk terms. That’s pathetic.

Like impressively bad. Like how bad do you have to be to get that few views? Like there are people that record videos of them farting and getting 10,000 more views than me. Right? So it’s like, what am I doing wrong here? And the truth is I didn’t want to appear as super broke, as, as struggling and trying to launch this product out of despotism. Right. I thought that would make me appear very unprofessional and I tried to appear like everything’s going well. I’m part of a big business and you better be here for the next big launch of our big new product sort of thing.

And no one cared. No one cared. It was very YouTube-y forced onto tick talky. Like infomercial. Infomercial. Yeah, exactly. And I was like, I really got to change my strategy here. And you know, a couple of things sort of happened, but the big thing that happened was my sample finally arrived and I opened this thing up and it was a mind numbing experience of what I had accomplished at that point. I’ve never ran operated a business. I didn’t know how to talk to manufacturers. I didn’t know how to design products.

I didn’t know I do any of this stuff. And when I opened this and saw for the first time, I got really emotional because in the big picture, I hadn’t accomplished anything. I didn’t, I haven’t made like any real sales. I haven’t solved my problem, right? I, this thing isn’t launched and doing well, but like sort of on a small frame, what I accomplished was more than I ever thought I was capable of doing. And I was so proud of this box and the product that I put so much heart and soul into that I decided to completely switch my strategy at that point. Like 100%. I’m like, you know what?

I don’t want to pretend that I’m someone I’m not on this platform. Like I know I’ve been kind of showing people the process of these being made, but I’m coming at it from this perspective of this is what it’s going to be. Give us your feedback. You know, you’re lucky to buy this thing. And when it comes available, sort of thing, I’m like, that’s not who I am.

The truth is, is I’ve been going through a lot these this past year. And I’m doing this to try and, you know, save my house, save possibly my life, save my lifestyle, save all this type of stuff and turn my life around. And what I’ve accomplished, I’m so freaking proud of it. And I started making that the content showing people the battle I’m going through, because so many other people are going through that battle right now at the same time.

And I think it was three videos in doing that. A video goes viral. And it’s when I started sharing my story of what I went through. And I took a TikTok trend. And it was the first time I started tweaking trends. It was it was like a typing trend based off the movie Drumline where Nick Cannon’s like doing the drum solo and people were typically like mad emailing bosses and talking trash to their bosses. For me, it was a friend asking about drink recipes because all the bars are closed.

And I’m like, dude, I’m thinking about making all these recipes and available for people when we go back and forth. And I’m like, I did it. I made it. And then the other person’s like, that’s sick. I’ll buy it. And the video actually just went viral, got 600,000 views out of nowhere. And the crazy thing is I had no idea how I was going to afford these things like to get them manufactured that cost a boatload of money. Right. I didn’t have.

So I had the next chapter. What’s that? I said, we’ll be getting there. We’ll be getting there. Yeah. I didn’t know what the next chapter was going to lead, but I posted this video, thought nothing of it. And I’m out walking my dog and I’m walking my dog and my phone starts to vibrate. You know, like what’s going on? Like what are my friends up to? And I’m looking at it and I’m getting all these notifications from TikTok. And if this could indicate how poorly of a performer I was on TikTok, yes, I still had notifications on.

That’s how few and far between they were. Yeah. And it’s just like going crazy. And I’m like, what is happening? And I opened up my TikTok at this point, it’s got like 10,000 views. And I’m like, holy crap. Like people are watching this and the comments are pouring in like, where do I get it? Where do I buy it? I want it. I want it. I want it.

And, um, I didn’t have at the time, I think this still might be the case, but you had to have a thousand followers on TikTok to have a clickable link in your bio. Yeah. I didn’t have that. So, um, I put, uh, you could tag or you could pin your comments back then. So I’m like, I have a, uh, kicks or an Indiegogo campaign going, go to Indiegogo, search cocktail cards, and you can pre-order so many steps for the viewer to go through. I’m like, no one’s going to do that. Yeah. Not exactly frictionless. Yeah. It’s about as much friction as you could possibly apply.

But on this walk, I’m saying ding, ding, ding, ding. Like emails are coming in and people are buying them. Like, people are going out of their way. This is insane. Like what is happening? And so I’m like refreshing. I’m still like out walking my dog, like freaking out, having a mini heart attack. Like what do I do? And, uh, luckily Indiegogo, this is a good reason why did Indiegogo is after your campaigns over, they have this phase called in demand.

So you can continue to use their website as long as you want for pre-sales, which is pretty cool. So I’m like, okay, I got to figure out how to link people to this thing. Cause this like every time I refresh, it’s like another 5,000 views, 10,000 views. And finally I got to a thousand followers after about 15 minutes and I was like, okay, uh, link in bio and then I click it and there was in, put your link in bio. I was like, yes.

So I went to Indiegogo, copied the link, put it in the bio and then the orders just ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, just started flooding in and it was all just so surreal, so crazy. And, uh, I got home and I was like, I need a break. I’m going to pass out.

Like this is wild. And I just started cooking dinner and kind of took the rest of the night off. And I was like, Oh, one hand, one hand cooking the other one with your phone, right? Yeah. I’m like, okay. How much? Refresh. Yeah. I know how it goes. Uh, so, but I did, I was, I was all about the numbers.

Like where are the numbers? And, uh, finished that video, got over 600,000 views, which led to over $22,000 in pre-sales that day. And that is when everything changed my, you know, all within, all within one day, all within one day, all within one day. And it all became, because I changed my, my marketing strategy, it changed my persona. I wanted to be more authentic.

I wanted to be me. I wanted to open up about my goal, my passion for this business, what we’re doing, what I went through did to create this product and people responded faster than I could have ever imagined. Okay. So now you’ve raised 20, some $22,000. I believe it was, it’s time to produce units, right? Produce inventory.

So, did you know where to go and how to do that? Did you have that lined up already? Yep. Had it lined up, had a, the manufacturer that sent me the sample. I was very, very happy with the sample. So I wanted to go with them, you know, and, and my initial run, I was thinking about doing a couple hundred boxes, which, you know, the way manufacturing works is if you make a large order, you get a better price, make a small order, they charge you a higher price.

Sure. And every manufacturer is going to have what’s called an MOQ, which is your minimum order quantity. So, you got to make at least this amount or else it’s not even worth our time doing it. So, 200, I believe was the minimum order quantity for them. And I would have been paying like 13, 14, 15 bucks per box, which after you ship it, after I ship it out to the customer, after I pay Indiegogo fees, after I do all that stuff, it’s like, Oh man, I’m going to have to sell this thing for like 45 bucks to even make any money. Um, luckily now I was able to do an order of 1500 units with the $22,000 that I raised and throughout the week, that video continued getting momentum. I posted a couple more actually finished that week with around $40,000 doubled it.

Yes. So, I was able to do that big order of 1500 units and I was able to get my price down at that time, I believe around seven or $8 a box, saving me a tremendous amount of money, like half of the price for manufacturing per box. And then I just sort of played the waiting game. Cause when you order a product to be manufactured typically takes about a month for a product to be made.

Every product’s a little different, but a good general rule of thumb is about a month for manufacturing. And then you got to get the product shipped to you from wherever’s being manufactured. Uh, mine was over in China. They were the only place I could find that could even make these things. Uh, I searched everywhere. I’m still searching for us manufacturers, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot of what’s going on right now. It’s kind of an interesting time to be in, uh, commerce.

But, um, so I knew it would take about a month for the product to be manufactured and about a month for it to be shipped to me. Okay. Uh, I want to go back actually to the content we’re backing forth between the fulfillment logistics and content, but that’s the purpose of today’s session.

This is how life works. It, nothing is in a perfect line with business. Everything is kind of splattered at the wall and you just have to take care of the most important things first. And a few different skill sets are required, right? If not quite a few different skill sets. And so, I actually want to go back to the video that went viral and the other ones you made on the heels of it that week, how thoughtful, clever, or maybe accidentally, um, accidentally strategic was your approach to the videos that now we’re getting tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of views.

If you remember that week or two, what exactly where you doing from a content perspective to attempt to get reach on TikTok? And what was it about that one video? You already said authenticity, but I mean what starting with that one, what was it about that video you think that really made it work? It was a tick tock trend where you showed your authentic self and was that it or is there more to it?

Honestly, back then that was probably the key part of it. Uh, I started to tell a story. So it brought people along with a story. The trend helped push it out initially. TikTok kind of works in waves. So they’ll push it out to like 200 people. And if 200 people are watching it, they’ll push it out to 200 more and then 500 more and a thousand more. And that’s kind of how they work.

When you isolate trending sounds and take advantage of trends of videos that are already performing well, they’re more likely to give you that first big wave of views. And if you pass that test, you get to move on. And what I was trying to do back then was figure out how to tell my story, be authentic and take advantage of a lot of TikTok trends.

Trends are not so much, uh, as important now. Um, I kind of miss that old TikTok word trends. I’ll be honest, trends were easy because the ideas were already there. You just had to tweak them to your own content.

And so, you know, if you didn’t have a big list of video ideas, didn’t matter, like go find out what’s trending and you had to be fast. You had to make those videos pretty fast, which I learned, make them while the trend is, is happening.

But I, I’ll be honest at that point, it was more exploratory for me. So how do I expand this out? How do I test as many different video concepts as possible? And actually during the whole time of manufacturing and waiting for my product to get to me, that’s all I did.

I tested and experimented with every single piece of content you could put out there until finally I actually landed on the three types of videos that performed very well for me and still a lot of the people that I work with and I help them launch products and do stuff. It’s still the same three videos, uh, that I teach them. We can go more into detail in that if you want. Yeah, I think that would be great actually.

So, what are these types? So, I call it my VSL strategy. I’m sure it’s probably tweaked and fine-tuned from other strategies out there that worked well on YouTube and marketing and other videos and concepts out there.

But for me as VSL, uh, number one thing that I really, really had to focus on was putting value out there, the big V. And this is actually harder than people think. Um, the, the main concept that switched everything in my mind that made it make a lot more sense was I making these videos for myself or am I making these videos for the viewer?

Who gets the most value out of this video? And it’s actually really hard to create videos that add more viewer value. That’s actually a hard thing. You have to rewire in your brain. We do a lot of this for vain. We want the views. We want the sales.

We want to look professional. We want the clicks and it’s actually, those are videos for you, not for the viewer. Backwards. Yeah. It’s backwards. So lead with value. So I decided during the 60 days it was going to take for me to actually get my product.

I was going to post every single one of these recipes on TikTok for free, not asking for an email, not asking for them to fuck nothing, all value, because I wanted to build up as much of the law of reciprocity as possible. Put value out there. Value will come back. So, tons of values. And this can work for any niche. I mean, any niche, right?

A bartender, obviously I’m doing cocktail recipes, how to use a shaker, how to make clear ice at home, how to salt the rim of your glass, what glass makes sense for what drink, what drinks do you stir, which drinks do you shake? Right? There’re tons of value everywhere. No matter what your niche is, put it out there for free. And it’s actually also kind of fine tuning my audience for when they do get the cards. They’ve already had a bunch of knowledge. Like they already kind of know how to use the cards because I’ve just been pumping so much value.

Increases adoption. Exactly. And that’s going to get you the most views, most following and the most reviews. Yes. Reviews, but also the most loyalty because you’re just pushing value out there no matter what you’re doing. Your stuff right here, these podcasts and these videos, you’re just pumping value out there for people. People are going to watch these videos and learn a bunch from it.

That’s a value video right there. My second one, which I jumped into by accident, but that was lifestyle or sorry, story, story, VSL, lifestyle is the last one. And we’ll dive into that. But the second one is story. So tell your story, what you’re going through, be vulnerable, be authentic.

People want to buy from other human beings. They don’t want to buy so much from corporations anymore. We’re entering into a creator led consumer time right now. Like so many creators are launching products and that’s what people want to buy. Mr. Beast, Emmer Chamberlain with her coffee prime, right? So many companies are creator led now versus corporate led. And people want to hear the story behind that.

They want to purchase from someone with a story. And I think what a lot of people struggle with is, well, I don’t have a product yet. I don’t have a story. That is the story. You’re creating a product. Let’s go find a product. Let’s build it in public. Let’s show people why am I creating this product? Well, I’m creating this product because I haven’t been unemployed for over a year.

I’m about to lose my house. And the one thing I’m passionate about, bartending, I can’t even get a job doing it anymore. Like, so I’m creating this to teach you how to make all the drinks I love to make at home. That’s a story, right? So I bring people along that journey. And once I finally got a sample of it, that’s when it really started to blow up.

So, story is a big part of it. And then the last one is lifestyle. Again, people don’t want to buy from robots. They want to buy from other people. Bring them into your lifestyle a little bit. Do you like snowboarding? You know, do a video of making a drink up on the mountain. Do you, you know, what do you enjoy doing? You like playing softball? Hey, go make a video doing softball. It’s like, here’s a quick cocktail you can make in between bet, you know, in between innings and stuff like that. Be fun with it. Bring a little lifestyle and maybe include family, friends, whatever you want to do.

Sprinkle a little bit, bit of that in there. So, you have a little personality. So, people get to know who you are as a person. Excellent. That’s a fantastic formula. I love it. All right. So going back to and by the way, where are we chronologically? Is this now end 2020, early 2021? Is that about right?

Yeah. We’re, let’s see, this would be pretty much about three years ago. Yeah. So this would be 2022. Oh, 2022. Late 2021 probably. Yeah, it took a long time. I was unemployed for a long time, really struggling. And then coming up with this idea was about six to eight months after that.

And then it took about a year to get to the point where we are. Okay. That’s interesting for everyone to know. This wasn’t something that happened in overnight or a couple of weeks or a couple of months. It was a full year of thinking through the product, doing your research. You mentioned that you lined up not only the manufacturing team, but you also had the Facebook group going.

Okay. So, you ultimately get your hand on sounds like 40,000 units. Now you’re selling these FBA. So Amazon storing them. Yeah. So 1500 units had about $40,000. Sorry, that’s fine. Yeah, it’s all good. Numbers, man, they fly over place and confuse me too.

So I have 1500 units. And again, I’m really pushing those videos. I’m like doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on TikTok at the time. And I’m also starting to capture a little bit of an email list. But- Ah, stop right there. Yeah. Okay. How are you building an email list? I went to Aweber.

And I believe on Aweber, if you had less than 1500 people on your email list, it was free. That sounds about right. Free 99, that’s my price. Yeah. So I created, I’m working on a lot of things. So my website, I knew I wanted to do sales on Amazon.

I knew I wanted to do sales on my own website. I need to get it off of Indiegogo at some point because Indiegogo, they charge you at least 5% plus they charge you all the processing fees and stuff like that. So, I got to get those margins up a little bit. So I want to get them on my own website and also want to build SEO on my own website.

Yeah. So I’m really focusing those two months on getting my Amazon listing up, getting my website up. And part of my website, probably my very first page I built was the email capture page. So started getting people there who didn’t want to buy Indiegogo, because not everyone wants to pre-order something on Indiegogo. They don’t trust those websites. And a lot of people are like, “Hey, do you have an email list where when you do launch on Amazon, that’s where I can go buy it?” That’s a really good idea. So I’m going to go do that.

So I created that and built up a good email list of a couples of hundred people by the time my product showed up. And I continued selling on Indiegogo. So by the time my product arrives, I have sold 1300 units. So I don’t know if you’ve ever packed up 1300 units of something before. Oh, that’s a lot of work. I mean, we’re talking two weeks nonstop, three hours of sleep. I’m working all night long packing orders. Best friends are showing up, helping me pack orders all night. My wife’s mom, as long as the wine was flowing, she showed up every day and she’s packing orders.

It was a village man. If you have to pack 1300 orders, you might as well do it with the guy that knows every drink recipe under the sun, right? I’m riding everyone with ribeye’s and cocktails and please come here. Next time you have to pack a couple thousand orders, give me a shot. I just might fly out there and give you a hand. Yeah, it was pretty fun, man.

Being down there and seeing close people pitch in and help out. But honestly, the grunt work, I’m not going to force people to be here all-night packing orders for a week. Everyone just comes in, help out for a day and head out. My wife’s mom, she ended up, she would help me for like half a year packing orders because I packed every single order myself for the first like six months.

We’ll talk about why that happened here in just a second. But yeah, it was a pretty fun experience, but I had 200 orders left at the end of it. Like, “Oh, all right, finally, I can ship this into Amazon. Let them deal with this.” Right? Like I’m finally, I’m over this. And so I send the last 200 units into Amazon. And this actually takes a little bit of time to check in your products at Amazon, which I wasn’t really prepared for.

It took about another month for all that stuff to kind of happen. And I, at this point, I’m like, “Okay, what do I do?” I’m kind of, I’m like on the edge of being able to afford another round of inventory, but not really. Like I don’t want to take out a loan to do this. Like I’m just trying to figure out the safest way to approach this.

Because again, a video going viral. It’s hard to replicate that. It is hard to replicate. And it’s hard to have faith in that. Like I had no proven track record that I was any good at this stuff. So what’s to say? Like, I’m one hit wonder or not. So I’m like, “I’m going to do this real cautiously. I’m going to put those 200 units on Amazon. I’m still saving every single penny.

Like I’m pumped. I can finally pay my half of the mortgage now, but that’s it. That’s the cutoff of any money I’m taking out of this thing.” And I send the 200 units into Amazon. I have that email list of a couple of hundred people, which I’m like pumped about that. Like, “Ooh, that’s going to get a good little momentum there.” And Amazon’s all about algorithms too.

Like all these online platforms are all algorithms. So, I’m like, “I just want to pump everything into Amazon.” So, I’m all about building this email list and no more selling on Indiegogo at this point. We’re done. Cut off. Boom. We’re all about the launch. So, I go to Amazon. I do the launch, and my goal is a thousand bucks that day. I’m like, “Please, please, please. Let’s do a thousand dollars in sales today. It’d be so awesome.”

I go on a couple podcasts that day. I send it out to my email list and we do $1,200 in sales. And I’m like, “Yes. Pop the bottles. We’re drinking some brandy today. We’re celebrating. This is awesome.” And I was pretty pumped on that. That was the goal. And I do all the podcasts.

I’m like, “Whew. Okay. I hope I can get sales tomorrow. I would love this thing to keep momentum up.” But I’m going to post one more video before I go make dinner and end the day. And so again, I’m just like, “I’m so proud of what I’ve accomplished at this point. Who am I to have a product on Amazon? This is wild.” Two years before that, I was the dude getting laughed out of interviews for jobs.

What was happening? So I was so proud of that. So I decided to create a TikTok, displaying my whole story of being rejected for every job interview, not being able to find bartending work, going through the whole process of creating the product, raising money, having friends and family help me out with that initial Kickstarter, having a video go viral to be able to afford, blah, blah, blah.

The whole story I just said, and here we are live on Amazon. Dream comes true. This is insane. And that video went ultra freaking viral. Man. Like it went bonkers. Five million views. I’m sitting here cooking dinner. This thing’s going ham. My Amazon products, they sell out instantly.

Like it’s gone. Two hours. It’s all gone. So I did, that would be two. I don’t even know the number. There’s like five grand or something on Amazon. That just goes crazy. And I’m like, “Holy crap. This video is going berserk viral and people want to buy them. What do you do?”

So I’m like, “Okay, my website’s not ready yet.” Setting up payment processors and stuff. Again, I love you on this stuff. I’m learning as I go. And I couldn’t figure out the website part of it yet. That was like the next step. Sure. And I’m like, “I don’t know what to do. I’m freaking out.” So I redirect everyone back to Indiegogo. And this video does over 5 million views. And I ended up doing $57,000 in sales that night. Wow. Excellent. And then at that point, the business is fully paid for. The next round of inventory is covered and we’re off to the races.

Have you had any viral video hits that big since then? I wouldn’t say quite that big, but pretty darn close. And that actually goes into when I launch on TikTok shop and stuff like that. But these story videos, if you watch my content, I rehash it on any major milestone.

Like we’ve done a thousand sales on Amazon. We reached half a million dollars in sales. I tell these stories and those always performed the best. And I still always get comments of people, “Oh, I remember when you first started posting your crappy TikTok videos. I didn’t even know you launched the product.”

I’m like, “What? This is crazy.” And it’s funny. All that stuff leaves breadcrumbs and people find you later on. You put in that hard work, you build that brand in public. People are going to come back and find you and have faith in you and want to buy your product. And yeah, it was absolutely incredible with that thing going viral. I get this email the next week, “Hey, my name is…” I don’t know if I’m allowed to say his name, but blah, blah, blah.

I’m the producer for Access Hollywood. We wanted you to come down to Hollywood and share your story and make a cocktail online. And I’m like, “Okay, scammer.” And I almost deleted the email. I was like, “Oh, I am DB, and I’ll check that name out really quick.”

So, I checked the name on IMDB. He is indeed a producer for the show, and I was like, “Holy crap. Okay.” And I’m like, “What do you need me to do? What do I have to sign up for or pay for or whatever?”

And he’s like, “Nothing. What day can you show up and we’ll get everything set up and ready for you and pick two cocktails?” I’m like, “For real? That’s what’s happening?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” So we booked a date. And one of my friends who owns a brewery here in Seattle, he pitched in the initial Indiegogo.

He was a regular of mine when I was a bartender. By the way, a lot of these people that supported the Kickstarter, these friends and family, a lot of them were regulars from when I was bartending. So that’s where a lot of people came from. Yeah, I don’t have that many friends, but a lot of them were regulars and stuff.

So, one of my regulars… So, tip to the audience, you want to launch a successful Indiegogo, you might consider bartending for a little bit, develop a regular clientele or any business where you can develop a regular clientele. Maybe that’s a good place to start. Absolutely.

Show your loyalty and who you are as early as possible. And you never know. It’s never burned bridges, only build bridges, because you never know when you may need to cross that one. So yeah, so it was really funny. So, my friend, he just dropped everything.

He’s like, “Dude, I’ll go to LA with you. Let’s do it.” He’s like, “Really?” He’s like, “Yeah, all right.” So we flew down to LA. I got to go on Access Hollywood and that pumped a ton of sales for the next round. And that probably brought in about 30 or $40,000 in sales being on national television.

And at this point, I’m selling out on Amazon constantly. So the email list at this point becomes my number one friend. Because when you sell out on Amazon, everyone wants to buy it. And it’s almost like it created FOMO times a thousand.

People are like, “What? It sold out again. I’ve been waiting.” And it’s like, “Sure you have. You just didn’t buy it.” And now it’s sold out. You’re like, “Actually, I want it. If everyone else wants, I want it.” I’m like, “Get on the email list. The only chance you have to buy it for probably the first year was to be on the email list.”

Because I would sell out of my inventory rounds almost entirely from my email list and my first few TikTok videos once I got back in stock. Wow. Amazing. So I want to bring it a little current day. Okay. Or up to current day, I should say. At what point did you really start to broaden your content strategy to different channels?

And what have been some of the surprise wins and also Ls you’ve taken along the way in diversifying outside of just TikTok? Yeah. I will say the holy trinity for me is probably Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Those just are the three that work well for me.

Are you doing all short form? I was doing long form on YouTube for the first couple of years and I actually had a couple of videos get over a million views on YouTube. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Okay. And when you start seeing the AdSense on YouTube, you’re like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, where am I? Okay.” And I don’t even have a high… Was it CPR?

No. What’s the AdSense on YouTube called? CPM? Yes. House for Millie? Yep. So mine’s pretty low because it’s alcohol and they don’t pay a lot for that. But when I make a… It was a tequila sunrise video. Has over a million views and it probably took me two or three hours to make the video. I recorded it on a Pixel 2 XL, like a really crappy old cell phone that I had at the time.

And that thing ended up going viral and it’s probably made me $10,000 in ad spend. And so I’m actually going to really focus more on long form videos now as I expand. And define long form for you.

That’s what? 10 minutes? Anything over two minutes. Anything over two minutes. Yeah. I would say most of my long form videos are probably in the three to seven minute range. Okay. Because there’s only so much I can do with a cocktail. If I do anything over 10 minutes, it’s probably going to be, “Here’s the top five drinks you can make for Thanksgiving,” sort of thing.

So those tend to do pretty well. And my YouTube videos actually pay really well. And some of them catch virality, the weirdest points. And then I can kind of… I put a lot of UTM trackers on my videos so I know who’s clicking on a lot of my links and purchasing. And it’s funny, some days I’ll just be like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of sales going on.

Oh, it’s my YouTube video from three years ago. That is the wildest.” So YouTube is king in that department. Long term search volume and allowing you to get views versus short form video. It’s a lot about the now and present sort of thing.

However, I will say TikTok is becoming a fantastic search platform. Their search ability is on point. I find myself going to TikTok about as often as I go to YouTube when I want to learn something. Because I can get a YouTube video in two minutes on TikTok versus a 20 minute video.

And if it’s too complex for my tiny brain, then I’ll go to YouTube and watch the full thing where I need to really be walked through. So TikTok is really playing the search volume game. Instagram obviously has been doing that for a while and then YouTube is definitely king. Expanding to all these different platforms, my number one failure by a lot is my inability to outsource a lot of the work that I’m doing. So yeah, I still edit a lot of videos. I’ve hired editors for videos, but it’s just hard for me to kind of give up that creative control.

The creative control, but also the, “Ah, the video doesn’t perform well,” whatever. I didn’t pay myself anything sort of mindset where I’m still in that like, “I have no money” mindset where it’s, you know, for me to grow in scale, I got to pump out more content because what pays the bills, what gets the sales, the marketing. The marketing leads to the sales. I need to do more marketing. I need to invest money in that. So that’s been my biggest downfall for sure with expanding to all the different platforms.

What’s your current cadence for putting out a video and are you mostly distributing the same content across the various platforms or are you making a concerted effort to make each piece of content you post to a platform unique to that platform?

Yeah, I would say in the beginning, it was real important to be unique to the platforms. Now, not so much. They all kind of don’t care how many followers you have. It’s all about creating that, crafting that perfect video. Interest-based content over like worrying about the subs, especially in a short form.

Okay. What’s your current cadence? Currently right now, I’ve been really focusing on eliminating traction in creating my video. So right now is probably the worst time to ask that question because I’m not posting very consistently at the moment.

I’m in a very fortunate situation where my product ranks really good on SEO, ranks really good on Amazon, ranks well on TikTok shop, and a lot of my videos still continue getting views right now.

But I want to make creating videos as easy as possible. So I just got done remodeling my bar to be able to make cocktails and stuff there without running up and down to my kitchen constantly all the time. So I’ve been working on that. And then I just redid my office now so I can do more long form videos that are sort of more talking head style stuff where I don’t need to be standing up at the bar.

And what I want to do, my goal will be probably posting three to five short form videos a week and posting one to two long form videos a week. That would be a perfect cadence for me. I’m also thinking about expanding my own personal brand versus the cocktail cards brand because right now all of my social is all under the name cocktail cards, which is brand specific.

So I’m also thinking about expanding into my own personal brand, which could be anything talking business, talking cocktails, talking whatever I want to be. I think it’s, I think it’s yet to be determined what the end goal of my personal brand will be.

It might be a little bit of everything and I’m not sure where the cadence is for that, but I would love to post probably one video a week long form on the personal brand with probably two to three short form for that one as well. Perfect segue. And at this point you are consulting with clients directly on how to replicate essentially what you’ve done, right?

Take your following and launch and build a product off of that, correct? Correct. Yeah. So one pleasant surprise of all this stuff is people see what’s happening and they contact me and they’re like, I want to launch my own product. Like how do you do that? Like how do you know what to ask a manufacturer? Like how do you find a design? You know, so many steps along the way. And so I’ve been lucky enough to have people approach me. I’ve never actively marketed any of that stuff. I don’t have a website where you can work with me personally.

I don’t have any of that set up. It’s just people contacting me. And so, and I don’t do it a whole lot because again, I like my time being free, especially now I have a three-year-old daughter. So I had a daughter in the midst of all this and I have another daughter along the way do pretty things. So I only take on X amount of clients, but it’s been really awesome working with other people and helping them launch products and teaching them how to, it’s a mix of two people. One, it’s people are like, how in the world do you launch a product? Like that is so over my head.

I’ve watched a million YouTube videos. It still makes no sense to me. And then you have the other people are like, I’ve launched this product. Where the heck do you find people to buy? You know, so it’s like the two worlds that I’ve kind of brought together are typically the two people I work with on a client basis and it’s been really fun. It’s been really cool. Before we run out of time, I did just want to briefly touch on TikTok shop.

That is, I gather a major driver, if not the number one driver of revenue for you. So could you explain a little bit to about how that works for folks that might not know and the role it plays in your overall sales and marketing mix? Yeah, TikTok shop is their attempt to be their own marketplace.

So you can literally watch a TikTok video and let’s say you saw cocktail cards and you’re like, man, I really want to get one of those. You can click the link and it’ll pop up on TikTok without even leaving the video and you can purchase the product. It’s really cool. It’s very creative, very awesome, intuitive, great for creators, obviously. Just the ease of being able to buy a product is insane. The thing with TikTok shop is they know that they’re competing against monsters like Amazon and so many online marketplaces right now.

Everyone wants to be Amazon. So, they are really paying you a lot of money to do this. They’re giving you tons of free views to post your product on these marketplaces. It’s actually really cool. When I first started the first year I was doing it, they would actually pay for all your shipping labels. So they would literally pay the cost to ship a product out to your customer, which was absolutely wild.

I decided to do this last correction. This would be two Christmases ago. I finally jumped on the TikTok shop bandwagon. I’m like, “Okay, let’s do this.” I had some issues getting signed up because they didn’t like cocktail in the title. They thought I was selling actual cocktails. Right. TikTok customer service is nothing but algorithms and pots. I finally got in touch with someone and they’re like, “I don’t know why it’s doing this.” I’m like, “Is there a way to fix it?” They’re like, “I don’t think so.” “Okay.”

My product officially on TikTok shop is bartender recipe cards. At this point, so many people watch my content, they already know what it is. It’s not an issue. I posted on there, I posted all these videos and it was the worst performing videos I’ve ever posted on TikTok for a long time.

I’m like, “What the heck is going on?” Finally, one November, I just do some videos. I’m like, “You know what? I’m just going to post videos. I’m going to keep TikTok happy.

They’re still doing well in my other videos.” I just replied to someone. They’re like, “Wow, I bought your five pack last year, gave them out as gifts and everyone loved them.” I’m just referring to a comment that someone put up, reposting a comment. I’m like, “Thank you so much. That’s so awesome. We’re even doing the five pack deal. If you buy five of them, it’s 30% off or whatever.” A lot of people love giving them out as gifts.

Thank you so much for all the support. It’s been incredible. I wake up the next morning and it’s got a million views before 6 o’clock in the morning. Wow. At the time, I could only sell 200 units on TikTok shop because I was a new seller. I wake up and it’s already sold. It’s sold. It’s five grand, done sales. I’m like, “What the heck?”

Then I go over to Amazon and all the people that couldn’t buy it because it’s “unavailable,” but they still showed the video to them. Also, a lot of people don’t trust TikTok to put their information on their flight yet. They go to Amazon and I got $10,000 in sales on Amazon. I’m like, “It’s eight in the morning. What is happening?” They were really pushing that stuff, especially that first holiday season.

I would argue it is an absolute gold rush of an opportunity right now to jump on something like TikTok shop because they are subsidizing you getting sales. They’re offering tons of incentives. I also saw people buying cocktail cards for 15 bucks. I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I can’t lose that much money on a sale. This is insane.”

Then I’ll go on the back end and realize TikTok is giving them that discount and TikTok’s paying me $35 for the product. Why were they doing that? Because they want people getting comfortable purchasing on TikTok shop and they want to have a lot of purchases on their platform, and they want to compete with places like Amazon. The way they do that is they subsidize the sales.

They offer people who haven’t quite bought something on TikTok like, “What if we give you 15% off? What about 30% off? What about 40%?” Exactly. They’re paying the seller the full price of the product and they’re subsidizing it.

Now, it’s like a 50/50 thing. I did a 15% off this holiday and TikTok subsidized an additional 15%. People are getting 30% off the cards for a three-week period in late November. I sold out like, “Boom, in two weeks.” It was crazy. Just a flood of sales. I think I almost had my first $200,000 month and it was almost primarily fueled by TikTok shop, which is just absolutely incredible.

Them doing that has also in turn really lit a fire under Facebook, under YouTube, and now you go to those two platforms, and you see the same thing. Instagram, you can purchase cocktail cards right on my video. Same with YouTube. You can purchase right on the video. Every time I post a video, it asks, “Do I want to link my product to this video?” They’re following suit as well and they want to compete with TikTok.

They’re also doing some subsidizing and stuff as well. If there’s ever a time to launch our product, we’re in a gold rush era as far as that type of system is set up. It’s incredible. Have you done anything with the live streaming component of TikTok, TikTok shop? I did a lot until I had my daughter. My time became so limited. I would highly encourage people who have the time to do it, 100%, especially if you’re starting out and building an audience.

I go live as much as I can. I just don’t really have the time right now. I am hiring multiple editors at the moment and as soon as I outsource a lot of the work I do, part of the reason why I’m doing that is to take advantage of going live because TikTok sends me stuff all the time. They’re like, “Go live. Sell X number of units. We’ll pay you $2,000. We’ll pay you $5,000 if I hit my goal,” sort of thing, which is just incredible. I would love to be a part of that stuff. They’re definitely still trying to subsidize and incentivize you to go live and sell products on there. Incredible, incredible story.

Next time you do go live, I would love to see you doing the cocktails in real time. I think your business really lends itself well to that. Hopefully, you’re able to scale a little bit, get some of your time back and jump back into the live stuff because I’m sure that’ll continue to work great for you. AJ, incredible story.

Thank you for sharing so much of your story and your process with our listeners. If folks want to buy the product or reach out to you for some guidance and consulting, what’s the best way to do either one of those? Yeah. For consulting, that’s probably a little bit more difficult.

I would definitely just hit me up on Instagram or LinkedIn, which is where you found me. I would be open to that again, no guarantee that I would work with people, but you can definitely reach out. I’m more than happy to send some tips and tricks and lead you to some videos and stuff that were helpful for me.

Definitely reach out. If you’re interested in cocktail cards, you can type them into Amazon, you can type them into Google. It doesn’t matter. This ugly face will pop up right away. I’d dominate the SEO scene, so you can always go check us out if you’re interested.

Okay, amazing. Well, thanks again. It’s been a great chat. To all of those watching, make sure you subscribe so you can catch all of these great episodes on how to grow a YouTube channel, how to build your social platform, and how to market across different niches. For now, signing off, I’m John Bertino, and this is AJ Rantz. Thanks, John.