The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] You were prepared for that risk and you’re able to say, look, I made a mistake and I’m gonna learn from it.
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[00:01:08] Is type of record button for Pete’s sake. Record this good stuff. Okay. Latest Chris, we are, we are getting cracked. Crack it on. Let me start that again. We’re getting cracked. We probably are. Ladies and gentlemen, we are back with a hot takes hot panel discussion today. We’re already into the discussion.
[00:01:25] I’m like, hit record Jason. This is good stuff, which I think it is. So we don’t need to even go round the table to know who wants to go first, cuz Chris is gonna go first. Chris is on fire already. Tell us what you’re talking. I have been in this game for like, almost, almost 25 years, like officially, right?
[00:01:43] Like I opened my eBay account in 1999, which if you say nineties to my kids, they’re like, whoa, how old are you? Freaking nineties. Um, nineties. But I mean, I, I can document, I got receipts. You can see eBay members since 1999, and I have tried to help as many people as possible who want to learn how to sell an eBay or flip products or make money grams on FBA or publish or any of these things.
[00:02:02] And I’ve seen. Not bad trends, but I’ve seen people think that it’s a system, it’s a, Hey, if I do X, Y, and Z, and it’s very similar to a traditional nine to five j o b job type mindset where I will, I’m willing to do X, Y, and Z if you will give me a, B and C dollars, and I know what I have to do. We know the deal.
[00:02:20] I’m gonna go home at the end like, I think very systematic in entrepreneurship and selling at Amazon and solving problems. It’s not that way. So when you join a course or a Facebook group and you wanna learn about how to sell an Amazon or sell an eBay, or how to source products online, it’s not as simple as someone says, oh, just hire a VA and have ’em go to Alibaba and find you something.
[00:02:38] Because then you hire a va, you don’t train them, right? Cause you don’t know how to train them. But you did the step, you did the hire a va, which is what they told you to do, and your VA. Told you to buy this product from Alibaba and, but this VA has no idea about intellectual property and, and keeper charts and margins and profits and lead times and all of these things that it’s not just a simple list of 10 steps.
[00:02:58] If you follow these 10 steps, you’ll make a thousand dollars every day on Amazon. I wish it was that simple. But it’s not. And not just like, oh, Chris said, it’s not that simple, so I’m gonna believe it. You have to actually believe, you have to actually understand why it’s not that simple, and that’s a deeper level of understanding, which gets to, you know, a certain level of expertise, which doesn’t come.
[00:03:20] Overnight, does it come from, you know, reading a single Facebook post or something? It is like experience, it’s learning, it’s trying things. It’s accepting that I’m gonna make a choice and take on a certain amount of risk with this choice, and hopefully that works out for me. And if it doesn’t, it’s okay.
[00:03:36] You were prepared for that risk and you’re able to say, look, I made a mistake and I’m gonna learn from it. And over time you gradually get better at something to where now you’re an expert at going Alibaba and in a. You can say Bad product. Bad product. Bad product. Potential, potential. Whoa, that looks that fast.
[00:03:52] Mm-hmm. Right. And I’m writing a book right now about books. Right. So, and I can take a, I’ll let you go in just a second. I can take a screenshot of a, of a scan of a book or retail arbitrage product or anything. And in less than one second I can tell you if it’s bad right now, it may take a little more time to be like, okay, yeah, this is really good.
[00:04:10] Like, how much should we really invest in this product, but spend a lot of time. But I can tell you to split second if it. Give me one piece of data on something, I can be like, no, Amazon selling, it’s too low. There’s too much competition. There’s, there’s too many FDA sellers, there’s too many offers. The sales ranking is back split second.
[00:04:24] No. Until you can do that, you need to like look at a bunch of data and try to learn that. So, and then get feedback. You other people, what you’re saying is your new training only has five steps, not 10 steps. Just one step. What? One step training. One step training. One step. Gosh, that’s gonna be. Here we go.
[00:04:45] I have one step training for you because the book that I’m writing that nobody knows about yet is a collection of all, it’s over a thousand books, a thousand images of books, me holding up books with a thousand barcodes that you can scan at home. Take this book and scan the barcodes at home because my, my old advice is you wanna learn how to scan books to sell on eBay or Amazon was to go to a thrift store or go to a library sale and spend the entire day there and be willing to sit on the dirty floor or the dirty carpet and scan every single book because you’re gonna learn pretty quick which books are trash, which books are not worth your time, and you’re gonna get better at not picking those books up and being more efficient at finding the good books, cuz most books are not worth.
[00:05:29] They’re not, you have to use the apps and you have to use technology to find out which ones are good, and you have to be good enough to read the data to be like, yes, this makes sense to sell. No, this does not make sense to sell. So I’m gonna give, the one step is if you take my book and you scan with your phone every single book, you will get pretty good at scanning books and knowing which books are good and which books are bad.
[00:05:51] But the one step is a thousand little mini steps. Love it, man. I’m loving this. Love it. I mean, this makes me think of my days as, as a piano teacher, as a piano student or back in the day, um, you know, French horn, whatever it is, a bit like in sports, whereas you, I know you guys are very into your sports. I, I, I was even educated by Jason, what the Super Bowl was the other week.
[00:06:07] I’m very embarrassed. I’m sorry guys, but bad cultural knowledge. But look, sports, um, you know, gymnastic, you thought it was the greatest salad bowl of all time. Didn’t. No, I thought it might be too baseball though. So anyway, you know, I know nothing. But here’s the point. If you wanna get good at a sport or a a thing, then repetition is the mother of skill, right?
[00:06:25] And or you know, So repetition, you know, practice makes the master, as they say in German, that every culture has a version of this saying, and I’m with you, Chris, it’s like the hard yards to train your brain to look for patterns. And the thing is, if you look for patterns in a very manual way, after a while, your brain.
[00:06:42] Just starts to get aboard and it will start to form an ability to live for patterns. But I agree with, you can’t skip that step. And I’m so with you on this whole, because I deal with the victims of this, oh, I’ve just ordered a bunch of stuff at Alibaba, you know, I’m forever, people are coming to me to get mm-hmm.
[00:06:56] Help launching a product. And I go, okay, before we do that, should we just examine the numbers and see if we should be launching the product? And very quickly it emerges things like, have you. The competitor’s product of this, um, cooking item, for example, working with the climb recently? Oh, no, I don’t own that cooking item.
[00:07:12] Okay. Go borrow your friend’s cooking item, put these extra, you know, accessories in it that you are thinking of selling. And do they work? And he came back to me. Yeah, they don’t seen the work. Actually none of them do. And I’ve actually bought some better products. I’m like, good. This is what we call applying common sense.
[00:07:27] Please don’t join us a thousand of these, you know, but, but you don’t know what you don’t know. To Chris’s point, if you are fu, if you are trained, and I think this is why I love what you’re saying, Chris. If you are trained to follow something blindly, as you’re saying, you’re not thinking like an entrepreneur, you’re thinking an employee and.
[00:07:43] It, it, it by definition cannot work. Cuz even if the first thousand people doing that, it works well. The 10 thousands person’s gonna be copying on. Everyone else does. And it’s gonna get saturated cuz there’s no differentiation. So it’s, it’s intrinsically substitute. It, it, it’s super interesting. So this actually kind of is a great segue into a topic that I was gonna bring up.
[00:08:00] And it was a article that I saw, which was why small businesses. And there was a couple people quoted, one of ’em being Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban’s. Biggest reason why, you know, entrepreneurs small business fail is um, they just don’t put in enough work. Like that was like his, his main thesis. And I was like, okay, well I, I kind of understand where he’s coming from with that.
[00:08:23] Uh, and then the, the, the big overlying, like big biggest reason was cash. Like small businesses running into cashflow. That’s a fun, but that’s like really the downstream final problem. The more upstream problem, and I would love to get your guys’ take on this here in a second, but the more upstream problem, I think is, uh, to what Chris is saying, right?
[00:08:42] There’s, there’s this lack of adaptability and there’s this, and it could, could be some work could be a part of it, you know, they’re just not willing to put in the work. But I, I honestly think it’s more of the lack of ability to adapt, which is really one of the fundamental. You know, features of being an entrepreneur, and I think it’s, uh, vehicle mismatch, honestly.
[00:09:02] It’s like where they just, they like, here’s my goal and I want to hit X, Y, Z, but they’re in the wrong business model that’s not [00:09:10] suited for them, and then they just try to grind for it. It’s not that they’re not working hard enough, they’re just working. Um, too hard. They’re working super hard on the wrong vehicle to get them to the goal, right?
[00:09:19] It’s like, if I want to go across the country, am I gonna jump on my bicycle and I’m gonna work super hard to get across the country, or am I gonna get in a plane and fly there and be there much easier, much faster, right? And so I think that vehicle mismatch is really an important aspect of understanding.
[00:09:36] And, and lining that with who you are as an entrepreneur and also your goals. And I think the downstream issues with that is the cashflow problems that come out of it and your ability to switch vehicles and switch, um, switch concepts and be able to pivot fast enough. Um, yeah, I think that’s is a fundamental thing.
[00:09:52] So I’d love your guys’ take like why do small businesses fail, uh, and entrepreneurs struggle so much with this. Yeah. I was gonna just jump in on that and say, you know, the book scanning at the library is an interesting. Object lesson. Um, I think it’s fundamentally, uh oh, it’s part of the learning process is to do something that, uh, repetitious.
[00:10:09] So you learn a system, but there’s a reason at universities, they have overview courses of topics. And, you know, like I remember, um, my most favorite class ever at, uh, university was, um, an overview of wisdom Litera. And I remember the professor Daryl Hobson, and he just brought knowledge bombs every week from these books.
[00:10:35] And, you know, these sources of material that I just never heard of before. And if you get a good overview teacher that shows you a lot from a dispersed genre of, of strategies or topics or whatever, you, it can really help you tremendously. And here’s what I mean by. My daughter likes to go to the library book sales, and, um, they do them every Saturday, the last Saturday, the month here in our town.
[00:11:02] And, um, I was looking for stuff to source. I was looking, oh, they have the, the DVD box set it such and such. I’m scanning it. Is it worth anything? And then she was over doing her thing and. And at the end I said, Libby, did you get some good books? She said, yeah, I got some good books. I was like, or have you read those before?
[00:11:18] Or you, you know, they’re new part of a series. She said, no, I’m, I’m painting on the edges of them. That’s a really super popular trend, and on Etsy you can sell these for like a hundred dollars, $150 if you paint, paint the, you know, if you lay a book on its side and it’s got just the, the pages side, not the bind side, not the, the back cover side, just the, the white pages and people do art on those.
[00:11:41] So you can take a book that according to retail, arbitrages would be worth zero. Um, and, uh, you know, paint on it and sell it for some amazing amount on. See, I’ve seen other people who take books that have, like, the classics are like the books that have really interesting diagrams and, uh, visual presentations like, you know, old books that have those line drawing type things and they’ll take them out and frame.
[00:12:07] And I, I think the gist of it is to me, fundamentally, when you’re starting, you’re way better off learning 25 business models and seeing them and, and you know, poking around in them to find something that resonates with who you are, what you like, how you behave and think. Um, then to just hear one thing and try to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind.
[00:12:31] Cuz if you heard the wrong. Or if it’s not right for you, it’s just a recipe for misery, you know? Um, so anyway, I, I, I think that, um, a good solid overview of all of the business model options online is probably a good place to start, you know, for a lot of folks. So, And I think the secret to that though is if you’re going to take an overview of, of business models, you have to do it by limiting your risk in it, right?
[00:12:55] Because there’s some business models that are gonna be very, very, like if you, you’re like, I think I want to be a franchisee owner and buy a franchise, right? Like, okay, well I gotta have a million bucks. That’s a million dollar risk. Like your risk of ruin to your financial future is a lot higher than, you know, testing something with arbitrage.
[00:13:12] You see if that’s what you wanna do. So I think you. That’s sort of the beauty of e-commerce as so many of these models are kitchen table entrepreneur ready. I mean, you’re like, yeah, they’re, you know, unless you’re ordering a large container of something or you know, big M O Q from a Chinese manufacturer, most of these things are side hustle ready, you know?
[00:13:32] Yeah, which is awesome. Which is, which is good. It lowers your risk for sure. Yeah. So almost, um, to sort of try and synthesize what I’m hearing, which is a brilliant discussion. I mean, I think, um, there’s a dance isn’t there, between theory and practice. And I, I’m kind of with you Chris. My sort of piano playing kind of side is with you and sort of PR practice builds a skill.
[00:13:48] But then I’m also with you, Jason, that, that, you know, if you. Really lousy. For example, I was terrible at rugby, which is like a bit like American football. You know, we just crash into each other and like lay waste each other. I’ve never quite grasped it except that it was painful. Um, I was never really gonna be good at that cause I don’t have the physique freak.
[00:14:03] So there is sometimes a mismatch. And to your point, Kyle, I think the mismatch or of a vehicle is, is indeed behind a lot of misery of business or success Indeed. When it’s right. So I guess, um, there’s an implication there that you should try things out. That you should have a, I think a mixture of all of those.
[00:14:17] If you’re more of. A book reading type person like I am, you know, in in, I guess we all read a lot of books or write them in your cases, but if you are bookish, kind of a bit more abstract guy like I am, you may be like the theoretical overview. If you’re more hands on type person, you might start that in.
[00:14:33] But I think you gotta have an element of both. But it also implies to me, Um, that you should start things with low risk business models and if you decide that you hate them after week, it doesn’t really matter. So with the retail arbitrage, it’s never really been my bag, but it’s never done me any harm to go out and try bits of it, you know?
[00:14:47] Very well, admittedly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, whereas what I see the opposite happening, even though you’re not buying a franchise for a million dollars, I mean, there are a lot of people are trained still now to go out and buy a lot of stuff from Alibaba that is neither differentiated from the marketplace. Mm. Nor is it, you know, available at small, cheap, you know, let’s start with a few hundred bucks kind of level or even smaller.
[00:15:07] And so I think there is a sort of logical order of sequence of, of types of sizes of risk, a business model that you should be working if you’re gonna experiment. That’s the only thing I would say. There’s a perfect solution for all this, and that’s what people keep, I think, trying to avoid because you know, they don’t want.
[00:15:23] Do whatever they think’s gonna be too expensive. And that to find a coach or a mentor or someone that you can actually talk to and actually get advice from someone who’s actually done all these things. Because you’re right, the number of site hustle business models that you can try basically, or free from home any time of the day has never been greater.
[00:15:40] Like the fact that you can go to a library sale and buy like a, a nice, thick, good looking book, and they put it in like this. Twisty thing. Like Jason, I know what you’re talking about. Where like, they kind of spread out the pages. So when you look at it, I don’t know if this is the one you’re talking about, you don’t actually see the image, but then when you kind of spread the pages a little bit, this image kind of magically appears.
[00:15:58] And they used to do this on, on older books like, you know, Renaissance and things like that. If you can find original books like that, they’re actually really quite valuable. Yeah. And you see this and you’re like, Hey, I, I think I could do that. That looks fun. And, but you have to understand what the actual value pro.
[00:16:11] You have to be good at like art and painting and drawing and all these things. You have to understand Etsy. You have to be able to ship a product. You have to understand what is the value proposition? What are people paying for? Why are people gonna be willing to pay me $50 for this $1 book? And how much time is it gonna take me to, to put into this to make?
[00:16:27] Is it gonna be worth it at that price? If it takes me longer? Do I need to charge a hundred dollars? Are people gonna be willing to pay a hundred dollars? You can test all these things, but if you think the business model is one, go to a library sale and buy a book for $1, two. Put some paint. Three, make $50 and be like, this is great.
[00:16:41] I’m gonna buy like 10 books and I’m gonna make 500. All right. But, and that’s what I see happening. Yeah. Yeah. And I’m convinced it’s because people are coming from a trade time for money mindset. Yeah. Yeah. All this stuff that we’re talking about, you’re gonna work for yourself for $0 an hour with no guarantee of getting paid.
[00:16:59] You could pay a hundred books and not sell a single. Yeah. Yeah. And you have to be willing to, but that’s the risk. And to me that’s a better risk than, than an $18,000 container from China is the risk of, Hey, I worked for myself versus $0 an hour. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On something that I was interested in. Yeah.
[00:17:14] That didn’t work out. But now I know that I’m not a good painter, or I’m not a good marketer, or mm-hmm. Me and Etsy are not like, I’m, I would rather sell something digital than physical. I would rather great. You’ve learned something, now it costs you time instead of money. And I see this over and over again where people say, that’s, wait, I’m gonna spend time on something and I’m not gonna get.
[00:17:32] No, I, I ain’t doing that. Think that’s the core trade skill that we’re talking about here is a willingness to be a learner. Mm-hmm. Yes. Absolutely. And adapting. Yeah. Yeah. I, to me, entrepreneurs willing to be wrong, willing to try and fail, like, like people don’t wanna do those things. Yeah. That’s the essence of entrepreneurship to me, is, uh, a self starting learner that’s, you know, curiosity and explorer and willing to pull the trigger on stuff like, I’m gonna try.
[00:18:00] Oops, I lost $1,600. Oops, I lost $200. Oops. Mm-hmm. I lost three months of my time. Yeah. Whatever it is. And those little micro experiments are really people who tolerate that stuff well and can, can convince themself that they’re on a journey towards mm-hmm. A better, [00:18:20] something, better future. Those are entrepreneurs in the making, you know, and you only have to be right once.
[00:18:25] Yeah. I guess you’ve never Right. The first. No, I would watch a 20 minute video from someone who says, Hey, I’m gonna tell you about how I lost $1,600, and then I’m gonna tell you how I lost $200, and then I’m gonna tell you how I wasted three months of my time, and then I’m gonna tell you what, when I finally made my first sale, and people wouldn’t watch that.
[00:18:42] Yeah. Yeah. People should be able to make that if they can’t make that. It’s, it’s a problem of like not knowing what you don’t know. Right? Right. It’s like, oh, I saw some micro content on TikTok about how to order from Alibaba and make $10,000 every single day. Yeah. It’s like, no, I. Mark Cuban’s answer that you need to work harder.
[00:18:57] It’s like, oh my gosh, that’s, that’s not an answer cuz it’s too simple. Like, yes, you didn’t work hard, but what didn’t you work hard enough at? Exactly. You guys, you guys see those reels in in tos that are like that, where it’s like, Hey everybody, I’m gonna show you how to make $500 a day, click here. No, uh, type in this way.
[00:19:14] What I do see it, look here, what I do is I see those, and I, I always say to myself, I am so, like, at first I’m like, oh my gosh, I might want to try that. And then after I see 20 of ’em, like, these are so simplistic and stupid. The worst one, the worst than that is, Day in the life of a 25 year old millionaire.
[00:19:33] Mm-hmm. I wake up, I eat food, I work out, I work on my business, which I’ve been working on for the past 15 years, since I was a pre teenager. Right. Like that, that, no. Then I check my computer and work with clients and make all this money. Like, no, I explain how you, right. Because yes, anybody, I can’t walk into that business and just do A, B, and C and make the same thing, Christine, deeper.
[00:19:57] I wanna see the video of like, here’s how I rented this Ferrari and this really great Airbnb house and shot this video to get you to pay me money. Like, I wanna see that explainer video. Listen, if, if you did that, you’d have an explosion of even more of this trouble. The one of the things that, are we basically just bagging on millennials marketing skills at this point?
[00:20:16] I don’t think it’s millennials. I, I would say that one of the fur. I think the, I mean there is element of that, but nine to five mindset. Chris, I think you’re right is a problem. Yes. But I think that is exploited to such a degree by like, I mean I don’t go on TikTok cuz it’s not my bag, but I see a lot of videos on YouTube and obviously having had the misfortune to go on a lot of um, you know, business opportunity or marketing sites or whatever.
[00:20:40] I’m being retargeted to Hecken back, so I get so many people trying to tell me how to sell on Amazon or whatever and I think that. Commoditization of business training. To your point, Chris, where instead of being a, a responsible, say, you know, physical trainer and saying, I’m gonna work you really hard, um, but we can cut to the chase and we can make it quicker, but you’re still gonna have to work hard and you’re gonna have to eat well, and then you can look, you know, ripped or whatever your objective is.
[00:21:04] So instead of being that honest person, you just. Promise people, um, the result they want in the quickest time possible with, uh, the lower sweat. And of course, uh, according to the laws of the homo, uh, wonderful equation, I can’t remember the value equation. The more you can promise that, the more you’re gonna sell courses or whatever it is you’re selling.
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[00:22:07] and the trouble is that just kind of, um, People start to believe it, understandably. Yeah. And I just think this mm-hmm. Disingenuous is the polite version of what that is. I mean, and this is why I’m loving what you’re saying, Chris, cuz as a leader of, you know, people, you know, created the term retail arbitrage, which has become such a, you know, a saturated market for people training or offering training and quotes.
[00:22:27] I think you’re right that the, they trade on this idea that it’s 10 steps to heaven and they’re not willing to. Empower people to become an entrepreneur and to develop the mindset rather than just follow their steps, which keeps the power with them in, you know, intellectually, in developmentally it takes, it takes advantage of the human brain’s disposition to avoid pain.
[00:22:52] Like when you promise, Hey, you just, you, here’s your 10 steps, or here’s the things you have to do and you’re gonna get this amazing outcome. All you do is you implement that, but what they just gloss over is all the, the valleys and the painful experiences you have to go through in order to get to that place, right?
[00:23:07] Mm-hmm. And you’re just gonna like, smooth over that because you don’t want to hear that. You’re gonna reject it and, uh, you’re, we want you to ignore that stuff, so you just pay bye. Well, if you’re making a 15 second Instagram reel, what do you want to cut out? The painful part or the payoff. Oh, let’s cut out the painful part.
[00:23:24] Exactly. Shrink it down. You know, and I think that’s also too, like attention span. You know, what’s gonna catch people’s attention? People are, you know, sometimes people are motivated by pain, you know, by pain, but oftentimes they lead with, you know, what’s the, what’s the benefit to them? Like, what’s the, the goal?
[00:23:41] How does it align to their outcome that they want? And so they can just kind of go with that from a marketing perspective. Yeah, I, I think there are a lot. I think that we’re viewing people who are putting out courses in, in short form content and like saying it’s, it’s super easy. I don’t think any of them or I don’t know of any that are actually doing with bad intent or actually doing it knowing, no, this is not gonna work.
[00:24:03] Mm-hmm. But I’m gonna say it anyway. I think they actually do believe like, Hey guys, this is retail arbitrage is really simple and one of the ways that I’m gonna come promote this, this next book that I’m putting out, uh, is kind of based on the fact that I used to. In-store retail arbitrage, scouting trips with people.
[00:24:17] And I remember every single time we would go to a store, I’d be driving there. I’d be like, what if we don’t find anything? Like what am I gonna tell these people? Like this isn’t magic. Like I, this isn’t just walking in like I, I was literally emotionally like scared to go in and be like, What if we don’t find anything then, then I’m gonna look like, oh, Chris Green said it was easy.
[00:24:33] It’s not. Now keep in mind we always did find something. Um, but what stuck with me, and I I still know this person that, that I, I showed this to is we’re scanning things in clearance. There were some easy, obvious items, but easy, obvious to me because I’ve been doing, I can look at a, at a scan and be like, oh sakes, of course we’re gonna buy that.
[00:24:48] And they’re like, well, why? Why are we gonna. They have to sit there and break it down and say, well, look, Amazon’s not selling it. The lowest price is this. It’s gonna have this much of a payout. The sales rank is really good. And by showing people the data and walking them through a single example and saying, look, if you don’t buy this, I will buy it.
[00:25:02] They got it. And like, like I, I remember to this day, like they got it because they saw the data, they kind of thought. That it was a good product, that they didn’t have that confidence. And then with me standing there looking at it with them and saying, yes, you are right. You are reading the data correctly, you should buy this.
[00:25:18] It gave ’em that confidence to move forward. Mm-hmm. And it’s, yeah, and it’s that type of experience and working with somebody be like, oh, wait a minute, okay, I, I am getting this. Uh, and like we looked at other items and, and they were like, Hey, what about this one? This looks good. And I’d be like, Hey. When you forgot that Amazon is selling that below all the B price, like I, I still remember these silly examples from like 12 years ago.
[00:25:37] It’s things like that, like, they’re like, oh, you’re right. I missed that data. Now they’re gonna be wired to always look. Or is Amazon a seller or not? And if they are, what is the price? And at that price is a profitable and are they always in stock? If they’re not in stock, what does the price go to? Little things like that where, yes, I can teach you that, Hey, go.
[00:25:52] We’re gonna scan some products and we’re gonna look at the data and we’re gonna buy some stuff and sell on Amazon and make profit. Yes, that’s what we’re doing, but it takes time to actually learn this. So I’m trying to think what are the ways that people can do this? Easy, fast, inexpensive. And that’s what this book is, over a thousand books, thousand different books.
[00:26:09] You know how long this has taken? It is tedious, tedious. A thousand books worth of images. Are they all worth images, barcodes, screenshots, commentary, like all of these things. But if you through this book, they’re all worth nothing. Oh, there’s a lot of good books in there. That’s the thing. I’ll be collecting these books and, and not sending them into FBA for so long.
[00:26:30] Uh, wow. But I’ve got stacks of good books, and I’ve got stacks of bad books, and I’ve got great examples. Or if you go through this, you will get good at scan your books, but you gotta go through the work. You gotta scan a thousand pages out of my book and you’ll learn. And I don’t know, I, I’m hoping that the, the good marketers, I don’t wanna say they’re bad marketers, but the marketers that really aren’t thinking this through and realizing that when they say it’s so easy, just hire a VA and go on Alibaba.
[00:26:54] They’re potentially doing a disservice to people who are taking it completely too. Yeah, I thought a lot about this because I’ve observed some people’s trainings and I, I won’t say any of the details, but I’ll just say this. There’s some folks who I know have done insanely well teaching online, and I showed their training to Cinnamon cuz their training focuses on, on moms.
[00:27:19] And, uh, I said to her, what? Look at, look at how they’ve done this. Look at, look at what they’ve done. And it was basically mom’s side hustle. You know, you can do your mom thing and, uh, and still make a ton of money, be, you know, [00:27:30] scale your business and not miss out on anything with your kids. And Cinnamon’s commentary was after having her children be raised while she was an entrepreneur and having her children and their twenties, there’s a ton of regrets and there’s actually a ton of.
[00:27:52] And there’s actually a ton of, uh, challenges being a entrepreneur and what those people are selling is a dream to a naive young moms, and they’re not doing it. To your point, Chris, with bad intention, but their own life journey is that they actually don’t have, they haven’t gone, they’re selling something and they haven’t gone through the full life cycle of it.
[00:28:15] And I think a lot of the sales that. Online for people who are training or the 15 second how to do this, how to do that and make money. They’re not coming at it from a, a evil place. They’re coming at it from a, a naive place because maybe it did work for them, but on the whole, if a thousand people tried it, three people would have success and 997 people would fail.
[00:28:41] And they, you know, if you’re one of those three people, it’s like, boom, bang, boom. Look at this. It’s so. And the naivete that you’re bringing to the party is not, uh, it’s not a, it’s not a, a evil, but it’s ignorance and it, it is a problematic, uh, presentation for that reason. You know? And I think now you have 997 people who are potentially now gonna be told that they didn’t work hard enough.
[00:29:07] Yeah, well yeah, that’s true right now they’re gonna think they did something wrong. Yeah, and that’s, we need to start some kind of like just open group member me mentorship thing where people can get like real, like real, get the real info. But the problem is, here’s the problem. The problem is it’s not sexy, it doesn’t sell.
[00:29:22] I know you don’t get the two Comma Club award. Label for being a discreet and moral marketer that actually has nuanced, you get the two club award because you have the revenue to prove it. And the whole system is designed to, uh, confer prestige on people based on sales results, not based on did my students actually win, did I do a training that I could still, um, have good integrity?
[00:29:51] With for 10 or 20 years, or is this a flash in the pan and I just don’t even know it cuz you know, whatever. So anyway, so those are the harder challenges with this. I would say on top of that as well, that that NFT is true when you’re dealing with very, uh, young people or people who are early in the stages of, you know, being a mom or, um, being an entrepreneur or combining the two, for example.
[00:30:10] But also there’s a survivorship bias thing. So if a thousand tried it in three would succeed. Well, that’s true in stock market investing. That’s true for graduates from university who teach us professors and teach other people how to be successful. There’s true in so many walks of life that the people who make it.
[00:30:25] Make the natural, but I believe just statistically utterly wrong assumption. To your point, Jason, that I did it this way, it worked for me, and then. You know, in many cases, great confidence and full self-belief, and trying to be honest as they see it, tell other people to do the same thing they did. Mm-hmm.
[00:30:42] But of course, if it’s not reproducible by other people, then that’s the key place where it falls down. Right. Which is, yeah. I think where a lot of things go wrong, it’s because they were early to something and they had some luck, and maybe they happen to have certain characteristics that are innate as an entrepreneur.
[00:30:55] And the combination of those made them successful and then they teach people. The things that are lacking. However, for those people are, the steps are the same. The entrepreneurial drive isn’t the same or the mindset that happens to be right. They don’t happen to be early in the market by, by definition, if they’re following somebody else’s training, they’re probably follower in the market.
[00:31:12] So that makes it much less like to succeed and they may just not be lucky. Right. So it comes down to how do you create something that has, as you say, if you can last for 10 years, I’m on the internet in dog years. That’s incredible life. I mean, if something’s valid for three years, that’s training. That’s pretty good On the internet, I would say.
[00:31:28] Yeah. Well, I think it also down to actually having a, oh, sorry. Sorry. I was just gonna say, I think it also comes down to having a real desire to a care for people, you know, for your students to have a, a community of students that you actually have a real desire to help and support. It’s not a money grab, you know, we’ve all followed marketers or money grab marketers and they end up with the money and you, you end up with some obscure, little silly training that didn’t help you in any way, shape, or.
[00:31:56] You know, and that’s never fun. And who wants to be in that community of, of teachers? Absolutely. Well, look, we, we’ve trashed internet marketing trainers to death even, and that includes ourselves. Hopefully not, not in the way we’ve all experienced. So who wants to go with another topic? I’ve got some things in my mind.
[00:32:13] Kylie, you were talking about Mark Cuban and his somewhat dubious view and why small businesses fail. That sounds very Mark Cuban and we’ve agreed to disagree. Maybe. Um,
[00:32:21] Hey folks. Thank you so much for listening to the e-Commerce Leader Hot Takes. I think they’re getting hotter over time. They, we are getting quite heated debates today, or, you know, discussions, shall we say about entrepreneurship from, um, Chris Green, particularly leading that discussion. I think that’s great.
[00:32:36] Why small businesses fail? Is it Mark Cuban’s thing and they don’t put enough work? Is it like a cash flow? Is it like a adaptability? Is it according to Chris more not developing the right mindset, just following steps? I guess we’ve, uh, given you some of our thoughts here, but I think what’s interesting is that there’s more than one, um, where, you know, thinking about this stuff.
[00:32:55] So I think this is more than anything, a call to you to go and think about if you are an entrepreneur or you’re wanting to become one or you’ve been one for years, um, what is it that actually causes business success and how do you really get started with, uh, business models? I guess one of the things we’re talking about particularly today is like if you’re starting off, uh, into business, and particularly in e-commerce, Where do you start and you know, how do you find the right models and how do you decide what to try out first?
[00:33:21] Obviously retail arbitrage is a classic kind of tryout business model in the e-commerce space, particularly in the Amazon focused piece of it, which Chris is, um, not only got amazing history of, but actually coined the term, the term for retail arbitrage was basically a Chris Green invention as far as I know.
[00:33:36] And um, so his latest. Should help you train you in retail arbitrage. So if that’s something you’ve been considering, definitely be worth looking out for notifications from Chris coming up. Um, more generally though, worth thinking about, um, how, you know, what is the true secret to entrepreneurship, I guess to put it in a cheesy cliche term.
[00:33:54] No easy answers here, but I hope that you found today, uh, thought provoking and made you think for yourself, which I guess is something that I guess all of it, our panel members, certainly, myself included, would encourage rather than to blindly following a guru or steps or anything of that nature. Um, so that’s today’s Hot Takes episode.
[00:34:11] The next Hot Takes episode, we got, we are gonna talk about chat, d p t and artificial intelligence. It’s kind of jumping on a bandwagon in the sense that it’s a very popular topic, but we are truly passionate about discussing this stuff, so stay tuned as ever. If you have found this thought provoking or useful in any way, then don’t forget to subscribe to the show on a podcast player of your choice, such as Apple Podcasts, um, or Spotify or Google to name the three.
[00:34:38] Thanks for listening to the e-commerce leader.
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