The Bright Ideas eCommerce Podcast | Proven Entrepreneur Success Stories

In today's episode, I'm joined by Dave Woodward, Chief Revenue and Business Development Officer at Clickfunnels. If you haven't ever heard of Clickfunnels, they are the fastest growing privately owned software company on the planet, and they have accomplished this feat by helping their customers to build wildly profitable eCommerce funnels. In my conversation with Dave, we talk at length about the common traits of their most successful customers, as well as go deep on what strategies and tactics are making those funnels so successful. In particular, we discuss the specific things you need to do to increase your ACV by as much as 5X; thereby allowing you to pay substantially more to acquire a new customer - which, as you might guess, allows you to acquire a lot more customers at a much faster rate!

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

In today's episode, I interview Steve Simonson; an extremely accomplished entrepreneur I met while attending Capcon in Austin in late 2017.  In our conversation, Steve and I talked at length about how his first company nearly imploded on its way to $75M, how they recovered, and why he'd never dream of building a company with proper systems in place. One of the things that surprised me most in this interview was just how much having systems in place affected the valuation of Steve's company.  If you are running your own business now and you feel like your drowning, you are going to find Steve's story extremely helpful.

In today's episode, I interview Casey Gauss, founder & CEO of Viral Launch - the company behind over 17,000 product launches for over 5,000 brands on Amazon. In our conversation, Casey and I talk at length about how to evaluate the potential of a nutrional supplements brand that I'm considering buying. We start off with my explaining how I looked at various pieces of data to determine if this was a market niche that we should pursue. Thanks to what Casey shared with me about how he'd perform the same research using different data, I quickly realized that my initial assumptions were probably not valid and I needed to take a closer look at each product's potential relative to the competition. In particular, Casey shared with me the 3 methods they use to quickly determine the potential for a given product vs its competitors and I was surprised to discover that some of what he shared with me wasn't event on my radar screen! After we concluded our discussion about some of the mistakes that I was making in the way that I was evaluating the niche, we went on to discuss the 7 actions that they take for each of their clients when it comes time to get a product ranked higher in the Amazon search results. And finally, we talked about some of the top few things that separate the brands who are doing over $10M a year from the brands that are struggling to get traction. Given my desire to launch my own brand (or buy an existing one), the timing of this interview couldn't have been better and I highly recommend you check it out.

In today's episode, I interview Shakil Prasla founder of SZ Ventures and owner of 8 (and counting) profitable eCommerce businesses - none of which he runs day to day. In this episode, Shakil and I took a deep dive into his business model of buying existing profitable eCommerce businesses. We talked about why he prefers to buy existing companies, how that makes fund raising so much easier, and how it allows him to keep out of the day to day operations. We also talked at length about how he finds his deals, the criteria he uses to avoid making a bad decision, and the myriad of creative finance strategies that he uses.  If you are thinking about starting an eCommerce company, I urge you to listen to this episode to gain a different perspective.  Starting a company is really hard. I have done it 3 times and I don't really every want to do it again. I'd much rather buy a business that already has products, customers, and cash flow. Truth be told, that is the #1 reason why I interviewed Shakil - I'm currently on the hunt for a company to buy and wanted to learn as much as I could about the process.

In today's episode, my guest is Vinay Patankar, CEO of one of my favorite apps; Process.st. In this episode, I get Vinay to share why he created Process Street and how it helped him to solve some of his own critical business challenges. We also talk about some of the best practices he's seen over the many companies that use Process.st and how these practices differ for small businesses vs large ones. If you are an entrepreneur that relies on a small team of local or dispersed workers, you are probably struggling with how to ensure that your team works most efficiently and effectively and when you listen to this interview, you are going to see first-hand the specific things you can start today to begin your journey to becoming a more organized (and profitable) company.

In today's episode, my guest is Erik Greene, founder of Coffee Booster - a company he started in 2014 with just $10,000 and today does over $50,000/mo on Amazon. Unlike many new entrepreneurs who shy away from competition, Erik didn't let the success of existing competitors scare him away from his chosen niche. Instead, he took an extremely methodical step-by-step approach to iteration and testing of his product, which resulted in such a low initial start up cost. Key to Erik's success was his 3 phase approach to increasing his sales. In the first phase, he discovered a very creative hack for getting his product to rank for his chosen keywords and relied on the support of 30 friends to make this phase a success. In phase two, he took what he was doing in phase one, and extended his reach by using Facebook ads. In phase three, he again extended his reach by using Amazon's own advertising platform in some very creative ways. As you'll discover in the interview, one of the things that has made Erik's venture such a success is his never-ending creativity and willingness to test, test, and test again.

How did you create the supplement? (networking, contract mfg, What if you don’t want to create your own proprietary formula? What kind of gross margins can you expect? How did you initially start to market your product? How did content play a role in your marketing? What types of blog posts did you create? How did you come up with your blog post titles? Where do you advertise your content? which social platforms do you use? What kinds of opt ins do you use? What kinds of content/offers are you using for retargeting? Free samples + shipping (1 click upsells) What does your tech stack look like and how much does it cost a month Is there any seasonality to your niche? How is Amazon playing a role? How does influencer marketing play a role? Links Mentioned Shopify + a bunch of third party apps (storefront) Wordpress (blog) blog.imprettyfit.com Clavio (email marketing) http://blog.imprettyfit.com/supplements/best-protein-powder-for-women/ (the content they promote) buzzsumo.com (to get a list of shared articles) keyword research on Google https://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.

On the Bright Ideas podcast, host Trent Dyrsmid from BrightIdeas.co shares the story of how he's building his eCommerce business (on Amazon as well as his own site), interviews other successful eCommerce entrepreneurs, and answers questions from his audience. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur looking to build a real business that can one day replace your job and give you the lifestyle of your dreams, eCommerce is an excellent choice and on this podcast, you will learn the exact formula to follow directly from Trent and his guests.