#736 – He Built An 8-Figure Brand While Working A 9-5

Robert Gomez from Kaffe Products is the definition of “build it while you’re still employed.” He started selling online back in 2012 (including an early mistake that got him banned), then worked his way back into Amazon the right way and launched Kaffe Products in mid-2019. The wild part is he scaled the brand while holding down a full-time corporate career, finishing as a senior finance manager at Microsoft. He didn’t go all-in until early 2023, and by then, Kaffe already had nearly 15 employees and real momentum.

In this episode, Robert breaks down why he chose the coffee niche and how he positioned Kaffe differently. Instead of competing with endless coffee bean brands, he focused on the accessory ecosystem: grinders, frothers, tools, storage, mugs, and the full coffee-making process. His very first product, a sleek coffee grinder, became a long-term winner with massive review volume online and eventually turned into his first product placed in Walmart stores nationwide. Along the way, he shares how keyword research changed his thinking, including discovering meaningful Spanish search volume on Amazon.com, and why tools like Helium 10 helped his team move faster, defend against competitors, and save serious time.

The biggest lesson is that omnichannel isn’t optional anymore; it’s leverage. Robert was thinking beyond Amazon from day one, even landing a major retail-style purchase before the product officially launched online. He explains how being “everywhere” (Amazon, Walmart.com, TikTok Shop, wholesale, and more) helps customers find you where they already shop and makes retail buyers take you seriously. He also gets real about expensive mistakes (like a $30K influencer spend that didn’t move the needle), then flips to unexpected wins like niche channels that generated hundreds of thousands in profit-heavy Q4 sales. If you want a playbook for going from Amazon to omnichannel to big-box shelves, this one is packed.

In episode 736 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Robert discuss:

• 00:00 – Building A Multi-Million Amazon Brand While Working Full-Time
• 00:44 – Meet Robert: Selling Since 2012 & Launching Kaffe Products In 2019
• 01:40 – Microsoft Career & Why He Didn’t Quit Until Early 2023
• 02:58 – Why Coffee: From Planners To Home & Kitchen Opportunity
• 03:56 – The Real Angle of His Business
• 05:08 – First Product To Now In Every Walmart Store
• 07:02 – How Helium 10 Fueled His Business
• 08:10 – Keyword Surprise: Spanish Searches On Amazon.com
• 11:36 – Omnichannel From Day One
• 16:13 – Kaffe’s TikTok Shop Strategy
• 17:38 – Biggest Mistakes He’s Made
• 19:35 – Surprise Wins of Kaffe
• 24:45 – What’s Next for Kaffe

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Imagine running a multi-million dollar business on Amazon for years while still working for the man at a full-time corporate job. That’s what today’s guest did, but now he’s finally quit his day job a few years ago and has built a highly successful brand that you can now even buy in all Walmart stores. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so we’ve got Robert from Kaffe here in Miami, Florida. We flew all this way just to meet him. Robert, how long have you been selling online?

Robert:

Well, my journey goes back all the way to actually 2012 when I started selling on Amazon and eBay. It wasn’t with the current brand that I have, but sort of one thing led to another where 2019 I was able to start Kaffe Products.

Bradley Sutton:

So for seven years you were just doing kind of random stuff?

Robert:

Yeah, random stuff. I don’t know if we want to get fully into it, but essentially early on in 2012 I started selling Otter Box cases. Kind of a college student sort of a dumb idea and basically got banned from Amazon. Yeah, I’ll admit it. And so it took me about another five years to get another account and finally be able to do it the right way.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, what were you doing for gainful employment at this time?

Robert:

So I had a full career. I majored in Finance, started working as a financial analyst for a couple years.

Bradley Sutton:

Where’d you go to school?

Robert:

Kennesaw State University in Georgia Tech. I got my MBA as well, but I was doing consulting for a while and then ultimately started working for Microsoft. That was my last job. So I was a senior finance manager at Microsoft all while already running Kaffe on the side.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. So how long did you still work full-time at Microsoft before you went full-time online?

Robert:

At Microsoft, I worked there for two years and prior to that, so I started Kaffe mid-2019 and I kept my full-time role at Microsoft until maybe early 2023.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh wow, so you stayed working full-time even while…

Robert:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So Kaffe was kind of like a side hustle for a while.

Robert:

It was a side hustle, but at the same time I had almost 15 employees by the time I quit. So it was really, I was the last one to kind of jump ship and for different reasons, but it’s nice to get paid a ton of money and still be able to run your brand. Thankfully, I had a really flexible role, but at the end of the day, what I wanted to do was be full-time with a business.

Bradley Sutton:

What made you go into the coffee niche?

Robert:

Basically, I had another brand. So not just in 2012, but after I got another account, this must have been 2016 or 2017, and I started a notebooks and planners brand. So think of like a paper planner, like undated.

Robert:

And I scaled that to six figures really the first year and it just kind of like lingered at that amount of sales. And so I kept, through research and different tools and just friends in the space, I kind of kept seeing that home and kitchen and health and wellness or whatever those categories were scaling a lot more. And so one thing led to another, a lot of Alibaba, a lot of supplier talking, but I figured I could get behind coffee just because I drink coffee and understand it. And I thought there was an angle there.

Bradley Sutton:

Were you looking at it strictly from kind of like a passion viewpoint and like, hey, I’m a little bit knowledgeable or were there any indications in the market where it’s like, hey, I don’t think there’s that much competition or you’re like, hey, there is competition, but I think I can beat them.

Robert:

Yeah. So I think a combo of both. But like if you think about it, most people know about coffee, right? You either drink it or you obviously know what it is. And it’s obviously a category that’s sort of growing. And the way I saw it was that, you know, if I got into the coffee space, there’s obviously thousands of coffee brands.

Robert:

But in reality, most of the coffee brands that are out there, they focus on coffee beans. Right. So if you go to a grocery store, you go, you know, wherever coffee shop they have nicely branded coffee beans, they know all about coffee making process and everything. But there’s not many actual coffee brands that are known for the accessories, you know, like even coffee machines. Right. So it’s mostly like coffee bean brands.

Robert:

And, you know, a lot of legacy players that compete kind of like all over the home have some coffee products, but they’re not necessarily known for it. Right. Like a good example, I don’t know, Cuisinart or KitchenAid. Everybody knows those brands. They do make like a coffee grinder. Right, for example.

Robert:

But they’re also known for making refrigerators or, you know, stoves or whatever it is. So, you know, I thought, you know, with a name like Kaffe and just like truly dialing in and all the, you know, areas of the coffee making process, I thought there would be an angle there.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you still selling the first Kaffe product that you had started?

Robert:

Yeah. So I’ll show you here. This one right here. It’s basically a basic coffee grinder.

Bradley Sutton:

Twelve thousand reviews already. Wow.

Robert:

Yeah. And so if you see it on Walmart as well, you know, we’re still literally selling the same exact product. I forgot where it went here, but basically it was the first product I launched and it was.

Robert:

Yeah, there it is still a bestseller within Walmart. A thousand plus reviews. And it’s at every Walmart store in the U.S. You know, so it just so happened the first product I ever launched some years later was actually the first product we got into a Walmart store. So it’s come a long way. And yeah, it is just a simple coffee grinder. But at the same time, I thought it looked sleek enough and we could brand it well enough that it would make an impact.

Bradley Sutton:

In your first year of sales of this product, do you remember about what kind of gross revenue you did?

Robert:

With Kaffe, So I launched mid 2019. We must have did a couple of hundred thousand dollars the rest of that year. And obviously, 2020 was a big difference because that was COVID. So I basically launched the brand six or seven months before kind of COVID hit. And that took another trajectory there. But yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

OK. And then how long did you run with just one product or under the Kaffe brand before you launch your second one?

Robert:

It wasn’t too long, actually. So from the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to just have a coffee grinder listing and that would be the whole brand. So I did always try to build a catalog even before there was any demand for it or before we could even push too hard on other products because of capital resource constraints. But I did have maybe like five other products within like six months. So at least they were there and building up the catalog.

Bradley Sutton:

What role in the early days did Helium 10 play in the Kaffe journey?

Robert:

Yeah. I mean, a lot of research done through it, you know, like the Chrome plugin was always key. I still to this day use it basically daily. A lot of the keyword research, you know, like obviously it’s a pretty self-explanatory product coffee grinder, but there is so many like keywords that are sort of longer, longer, longer tail.

Bradley Sutton:

I got a question for you on that because you made me think of something. When people think of keyword research, it’s not just like, oh, I’m going to find all the variations of coffee grinder.

Robert:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

But one really finds out how different people search for the same product. I know, you know, my coffin shelf that I sell, right?

Robert:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

One of the converting words is this word is a half Japanese and half English where it’s called kawaii decor. Kawaii means like cute or something. Never in a million years would I have ever thought that somebody would want a or search and buy a coffin shelf by searching cute or kawaii decor.

Robert:

Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

What about you? Did you have a kawaii decor moment where you’re looking through Helium 10 and you’re like, people search this keyword to find a coffee grinder?

Robert:

Yeah. Well, an interesting one was, I mean, there’s a couple, but basically the Spanish version of coffee grinder, Molinillo de Cafe, which was just like, oh, wow, people literally enough people search on Amazon in Spanish that it makes a difference. And so, you know, Kaffe is how you say coffee in Spanish, too.

Robert:

Right. So like Spanish people will say, oh, wow, that brand sounds like, you know, in Spanish, European people will say, wow, that’s literally how you spell cafe coffee shop like in German. And so like it’s very relatable to other languages. And I did not realize literally on Amazon.com, not Amazon.Mexico that people are searching, you know, in Spanish.

Bradley Sutton:

And I saw that in Helium 10 that it had some search volume and stuff.

Robert:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Bradley Sutton:

Nice. You did a few hundred thousand dollars that first year. Which year was your best year of overall sales across the board?

Robert:

Are we talking just Amazon or overall?

Bradley Sutton:

Overall.

Robert:

Overall, probably 2024-’23. ‘24 were pretty great.

Bradley Sutton:

And how much was that about?

Robert:

Right around eight figures.

Bradley Sutton:

Eight figures. OK. And then how about what chunk did Amazon play in that?

Robert:

It played a probably a little less than half. It was probably in the 35 to 40%.

Bradley Sutton:

So multimillion dollars still on Amazon.

Robert:

Yeah. On Amazon it was made seven figures at our peak just by Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, thinking about what you were doing on Amazon, which is a big chunk of your pie, like if you weren’t using Helium 10, like you didn’t see all the keywords and you’re just like going off of what information you had available or whatever comes from advertising. What kind of hit would your brand take? Like what percentage of your sales do you think comes from stuff and insights, keywords, whatever that you found from Helium 10?

Robert:

Yeah, it’s certainly something that the team uses every day and something that would take even more team members if we didn’t have Helium 10. And not just like the amount of time it would take, but definitely like you’re saying, like some lost revenue, some market share, you know, decline there. The reason being that, you know, through Helium 10 and like alerts and all these things that we’re able to set up, we find out right away, you know, when, for example, a new competitor is coming in and they’re attacking, you know, they’re going hard after reviews or going hard after, you know, basically like the earlier you find out, the more sort of the ways of mitigating it are.

Robert:

Right. So you see a brand new player, it’s not the same kind of like competing against them and taking up their ad space, like in their listing when they have barely any reviews. And once they’re a little more established, it’s kind of like harder to do. So, yeah, it’s definitely, you know, something that saves us tens of hours a week just because, you know, we used to analyze keyword ranking, for example. Right. That was something we would do by hand, you know, like open up a browser, like on Incognito and see where you’re at.

Bradley Sutton:

One, two, three, four, five.

Robert:

No, that one was an ad. That one was an ad. OK, no, that’s the real organic one. And start counting from there. And like that’s just one keyword, you know, and there’s hundreds of keywords. So like being able to like filter by keyword, by keyword size and just like, you know, different keywords have different strategies. Right. Like your main keyword will have a different strategy than like your longer tail. But you still want to have focus on those. And like without this sort of tooling, it’s just not possible. I mean, it’d be there forever.

Bradley Sutton:

At what point did you add other channels? Like how long were you only Amazon until you’re like, hey, let me start Walmart. Let me start my own website.

Robert:

Yeah, I think I had that vision from very early on. So essentially from day one, I was almost trying to get new channels, you know. So funny story is that my the first order for coffee grinders that I ever placed was three thousand grinders. OK. And when the grinders were on their way to the U.S., obviously the plan was to sell just on Amazon. Right.

Robert:

Like that’s the only place we kind of had permission to sell. But I went on LinkedIn and found a buyer for T.J. Max HomeGoods at the time. And, you know, given we don’t have a website finished yet. We didn’t have an Amazon listing because we’re just now about to launch it. And the guy decided to take a flyer and buy two thousand of them. So before the, you know, before we officially launched the product, you know, even on Amazon, it was technically sitting on a retail show, you know.

Robert:

So that’s kind of from early on. You know, the goal was to get to retail eventually, like, you know, the packaging and everything we did from early on was with that mission in mind. But to speak to online channels, we started selling on Target.com as vendors very early on, maybe 2020, early 2021. We started selling on Macy’s.com, HomeDepot.com, Walmart.com. I mean, just you name it. And we probably tried that channel. And that was with the goal of being sort of omnichannel and not as reliant on just, you know, one channel.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I see here on your website, you know, I see Macy’s Fair, you know, TikTok shop, Amazon, Walmart, et cetera. And obviously this is a website in itself. Now, you know, what’s your message to other brands out there? Why is it important that they do omnichannel? I mean, you were kind of early to the game. I think not a lot of people were thinking as omnichannel as you were back in 2021. But nowadays it seems to be trending more. Why is it so important to not just be on Amazon or not just have your own website?

Robert:

Yeah, I think, I mean, you have to meet your customers where they’re at. You know, some obviously Amazon’s a huge chunk. Everybody has an Amazon account, it seems, and they would buy there, but they may not find you on there. Right. So if they’re scrolling TikTok, you know, and they find you on there, even if they don’t buy in TikTok shop, they may go to Amazon or they like going on Shopify and finding off your website. But you kind of have to meet the customer where they’re at.

Robert:

And nowadays with tooling and automation and stuff, it doesn’t take quite the amount of lift that it once did to sell on multiple channels. Right. So if before to sell on multiple channels, that means the orders had to come in. You had to go print a label and then go back to that channel and sort of like put in manually the tracking number, set the order, cancel or whatever. Where now there’s all sorts of toolings for the orders to just come in, flow in, print a label. It puts it right back to where it needs to be.

Robert:

Even with Walmart fulfillment services, you know, sort of like the FBA, Amazon FBA, definitely TikTok shop has similar things. So, you know, there’s no excuse to be selling on just one channel nowadays. Right. You could have one channel. That’s your main channel, of course. But you need to be elsewhere, you know, to have it almost like seem bigger from the beginning.

Robert:

Right. Like and that’s your chance to go into retail and other opportunities that come up is when buyers look at your brand and wow, you’re like everywhere. Right. Seemingly you’re everywhere. They’re probably think you’re a lot bigger than you even are. And that’s why they, you know, they may give you a shot to be in the store.

Bradley Sutton:

Is Walmart in-store a big chunk also of your revenue?

Robert:

Now it is. Yeah. So it’s at least 50 percent.

Bradley Sutton:

Would you ever have been there if you didn’t have an established presence on Amazon and Walmart.com first?

Robert:

No, no. I mean, the buyer, you know, I’ve been to Walmart headquarters maybe six times, you know, including before going live just to like pitch. And the buyer literally told us, you know, like even in the meeting, in our line review meeting, the buyer had our Amazon store sort of pulled up, you know. And so she knew exactly, you know, she was probably using the same kind of tools. She was telling us how much we had retail for, like why we’re running a certain sale and just like our review count. So definitely they’re very aware of what’s going on Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s another reason of why, hey, be multi-channel and, you know, start online because you probably would not have all these, you know, these millions of dollars of revenue at Walmart stores if you weren’t known. Yeah, I’m sure sometimes you like maybe somebody invents something really cool, you know. But that’s another point there.

Bradley Sutton:

TikTok shop is kind of different almost than all the other channels you mentioned here. You know, Fair, Amazon, Walmart, very similar vibes, even a website. How have you had to change your strategy as you expanded to TikTok shop?

Robert:

Yeah, I think and not everyone thinks this through like that, but there are certain products that work better on TikTok shop. Right. Obviously, even within our catalog of products, there’s certain products that work better on TikTok shop. And what do I mean by that? Think of a product that looks nice on a video. You know, think of a product that looks very interesting when you’re just watching a real type of, you know, like a quick video.

Robert:

I’ll give you an example. You know, if it’s just a coffee machine and you’re pressing the button, the coffee is coming out like that may not be the most interesting product necessarily for TikTok shop. Right. But if you think, for example, our handheld milk frothers right where you kind of like you press the button and then you mix something like the act of mixing and the milk foaming and just kind of like the coffee coming together, that is something more, you know, like people will be attracted to that a lot more video style than if you would like a more boring kind of product where it’s not much video.

Robert:

You know, that goes and products that have more margin, obviously, you’re able to kind of spend more on the on the marketing side. But yeah, certainly we learned that by just trial and error. You know, not every product works as well like on TikTok shop.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s one of the biggest disasters or struggles you’ve had as a business owner, like something unexpected and it really, you know, gave you guys a big hit? And then how did you get out of that hole?

Robert:

Let’s see which one should I.

Bradley Sutton:

We’re not trying to scare you. We just keep it real.

Robert:

No, we keep it real.

Bradley Sutton:

Selling online is not all rainbows and unicorns, you know?

Robert:

Yeah, not I mean, every business is this way, right? Like there’s just a lot of trial and error and a lot of mistakes. You know, I can name the name, you know, paying an influencer thirty thousand dollars to not really move the needle, you know, short shipping in order for Walmart that I then had to airship a couple of pallets. It cost about thirty thousand dollars itself just to airship something. A lot on the Amazon ad side for a while, we were kind of overspending before we really optimized our campaigns. That’s very easy to do.

Robert:

So you just kind of leave a campaign running. And we had so many campaigns that, you know, we were not necessarily looking into it or seeing where the waste of spend was going.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s where Helium 10 Ads could have helped you.

Robert:

For sure. Yeah. And ever since, like, we really structured more to where we’re able to make, you know, decisions a lot quicker just by looking at campaign names, for example. So, yeah, a lot of different ways to lose money or, you know, like waste money if you’re not careful. But at the same time, the way I saw it, you know, I was always willing to take a risk, sort of like spend up front to see like what led to what. And that’s what has led us to, for example, be at Walmart stores or have made other breakthroughs in other channels that, you know, we may not have otherwise done if we were just penny pinching.

Bradley Sutton:

Scared money don’t make money.

Robert:

Yeah. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

So now flip side, what’s some of the biggest surprises? Positive, like, oh, my God, you know, like amazing Prime Day or some crazy campaign just went off or big product launch that did better than your wildest imagination, something like that.

Robert:

Yeah, I have a pretty unique one. So this is a couple of years back, but there’s a marketplace. It’s not a marketplace. OK, but it’s a gift giving website called Snappy. I don’t know if you guys have ever heard of Snappy, but you wouldn’t even hear of it because you have to go through like Miracle, which is like a platform of different marketplaces. Essentially, we onboarded on there.

Robert:

It’s a random gift giving. So a company can go on there and get their employees like gifts and they use like fake money to buy products. But essentially they’re giving you real money, right? Like to the vendor they are. And we onboarded there probably like on October or like late September. I want to say a couple of years back. Right.

Robert:

And basically within that Q4, not even Q4, like November and December, we did almost like three or four hundred thousand dollars in sales at like 50 percent net profit or some crazy stuff like that where we were like, whoa, like, you know, what is going on? It’s like a channel you would have never expected. No one even knows what that channel is. And that, you know, that that thrill is like, whoa, like you just found like a needle in a haystack kind of moment. So that was awesome.

Bradley Sutton:

I just realized my coffin shelves would never do well. They’re like no company is going to buy all their employees a bunch of coffins. So they’re like, what are you trying to tell us here? What’s going on? But coffee like, OK, that I get. That’s a very good one. Do you keep selling on that?

Robert:

Yeah, we’ve kept selling on there. Another cool story like that is fair. By now, fair wholesale platform is very popular. But I think we were very, very early on to fair, I think 2021. And the way it came about was really interesting. Just I was on a road trip down the U.S. one West Coast just coming down and I stopped at a random kind of boutique store. I don’t know if it was a coffee shop or something. And they had like so many different products for sale, right? Like so many different brands and everything that I knew that the owner of that coffee shop had not just gone sourcing all those to the brands itself.

Robert:

So me being curious, I see a lady like in the corner sort of like take an inventory or some writing down, you know, I strike up a conversation like, where do you guys source from? You know, like it’s clear that you don’t make all these products and you’re not in contact with that many vendors. And she said fair dot com.

Robert:

And I said, noted. So soon as I got home, we you know, we signed up for fair dot com and we do multiple six figures there every year. And the best part of that is not even the money is just that we’re in over I want to say three or four thousand stores in the U.S. just from fair. And so I get random text messages from friends like, hey, I was in a coffee shop in Arizona and like this is your product. Like, what is it doing here? You know, it’s just like that feels so, so good, you know, like seeing your product out in the wild. It’s like one of the best feelings for sure.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of that, let’s double down on that. I see you on Instagram before you would always post like it seems like whenever you go to a new Walmart or a different state, you’re like looking for your product. How does it feel just to know that there are tens of thousands now, maybe hundreds of thousands of people around the country that have your product and are like drinking coffee from it like every day and it’s something you create? Like, how does that feel?

Robert:

Yeah, it never gets old. OK, I’ve gone to an Airbnb before, stay there and they have my coffee grinder, you know, or like I went to a random friend, well, a friend of a friend’s house and we went there and they had my coffee grinder. That was just like, what? You know, like what is going on? It never gets old.

Bradley Sutton:

And then you tell them like, hey, that’s my product.

Robert:

Yeah, I had to. But yeah, I know it’s like going into a Walmart and just seeing your product on the shelf like before that ever happened, you know, like that was like a dream, you know, like, oh, of course, like you couldn’t even fathom, like, how does a product get into Walmart, you know, and like you would hear these stories of like, oh, this company or this guy has some product at Walmart and like, you know, it’s killing or whatever, you know, like you just want to be like it’s Walmart, you know, it’s everywhere like to know that you’re always like the unreal thing for me is like I’m always within a couple miles of a product of mine, you know, like however it got there.

Robert:

But it’s really like I can go a couple of miles away and, you know, that product that originated from my factory and it touched my warehouse in Georgia, like is within there somewhere, you know, and it never gets old seeing a Walmart truck pull up to our warehouse and just kind of load it up and go like it’s really rewarding.

Bradley Sutton:

Are you only in North America right now or have you expanded to Europe or Asia?

Robert:

Strictly North America. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Any plans for?

Robert:

The thing with Europe is we saw electrical products and they have a different plug, you know, so that alone just causes so much kind of like, you know, logistical sort of issues within our supplier. We’ve had few orders here and there, like more like wholesale or like things like that to Europe. But there’s just so many retailers within the U.S. that we could go into, you know, like that’s like a big sort of strategy of ours is to, you know, not just the online part, but like expanding our physical footprint. And so, you know, it’s just kind of the beginning for us.

Bradley Sutton:

What’s your short and long term goals for the brand? Like you want to start a new brand, you want to expand more. Is it just revenue based? You want to get more into retail? Like what are you trying to sell the company later? What are you trying to do?

Robert:

Yeah. So I think with within Kaffe, you know, we’ve expanded our catalog, I think, to almost like 100 products or so. Spent a couple of years really developing that catalog. And so with the goal in mind of really expanding within physical retail. Yeah. So we, you know, I went to Target headquarters last year.

Robert:

We were really close. We think we may be able to get in there a couple of big grocery chains. And so like with those, it doesn’t take a big lift once we have the catalog already made. Right. So it’s just like really like trying to further penetrate in there. And I won’t say too much, but there may be a brand, you know, in the horizon, you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay.

Robert:

Yeah. You heard it here first.

Bradley Sutton:

Not phone cases.

Robert:

Not phone cases. Let’s just say it’s something you put in your mouth.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, okay. All right. That narrows it down a little bit, but okay. Interesting. Interesting. What would you tell to a brand out there who’s already doing well? Like maybe they’re a seven figure seller across different channels. They’ve never used Helium 10 before. And they’re like, why would I use Helium 10 on a seven figure seller? You know, like how do you think even a sophisticated seller who hasn’t used Helium 10, how can they be benefited by signing up?

Robert:

Yeah. First, I would say like, how did you get this far without it? But truly, like you have to know your business. You have to know exactly what is going on. Like it may not be the founder, but somebody on their team has to, you know, like I’m not exactly whether they’re if they are doing it, they’re spending a lot more time than they should. And if they’re not doing it, they’re missing out on insights truly that that will help drive further.

Robert:

You know, like there may be such low hanging fruit that they’re not necessarily aware of. Right. And just because they have blinders on. So I would say basically, like it’ll help you take a look at your business from top to bottom, you know, especially on the Amazon side. It’s every little piece you need to run your businesses within the Helium 10 tool. So I don’t see how somebody could run their tools or their brand nowadays without using some sort of tool, you know, and Helium 10 has the biggest sort of they cover A to Z. You know, it’s what I would say. Yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Any plan? I’m not too much, you know, hopefully you don’t hate me for this. I’m not too much of a coffee guy myself a little bit. I’m trying to get more into it, but I’m like into matcha and stuff like that. Any plans for like a side kind of like brand or not maybe even under a Kaffe to get into like the matcha space or anything like that?

Robert:

Yeah. So I think in more recent times we’ve done we’re getting a little bit more into the consumable part. We have a pretty innovative product that is coffee teabags. So they call steep coffee bags. So think of like a teabag where all you need is hot water, but it has gourmet like organic coffee inside. So like you take it on a plane, you could take it in your hotel room if there’s not like fresh coffee or whatever.

Robert:

But to go necessarily like a branch off like that, we do sort of play the angle of matcha or whatever, because we have our milk frothers and a lot of people, myself included, have used it for matcha is really cool. But we also have like French press coffee and tea makers, right? Like we really kind of like angle it that way a lot because people use those a lot for tea.

Robert:

But, you know, our name is literally like sounds like coffee. Right. So it’s kind of tough to just go in there. I think, you know, we’re doubling down on the subcategories and we really are about covering everything within the coffee making process. Right. So you have your beans or whatever it is, you store them in our storage containers, you take them out and you grind them with our grinder. You take it out with our scoops. You put it on our on our coffee machine. You use our coffee mugs.

Robert:

You literally everything within the coffee making process. And it’s not about having tens of products within each one of those verticals, but like really having like two or three like he wants, for example, coffee grinders. We have manual blade and burr grinders. Right. Like so we’re well covered within this coffee. But yeah, there’s so many different routes to take just in coffee itself that it’ll be tough to be like a matcha brand.

Bradley Sutton:

Or Vietnamese I’m really into Vietnamese coffee.

Robert:

For sure. I have talked to another founder of she owns a Vietnamese coffee beans brand.

Bradley Sutton:

I know it’s with the condensed milk in there. Oh, man. All right. All right. Well, I took a red eye flight last night. I need some Kaffe grounded or grinded coffee right about now to wake up. But your story is really inspiring, you know, from kind of like working for the man in the nine to five for so many years, starting this business up on the side and now being, you know, having nowhere in America where there’s two miles, where there’s not one of your products is amazing accomplishment. I’m very happy that Helium 10 has been able to help you with that journey. And I wish you all the success in the future.

Robert:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

---

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product and keyword research to listing optimization, advertising, and revenue recovery automation. Make running a successful Amazon and TikTok Shop business easier with better data and insights. Use code SSP20 to save 20% off! See what our customers have to say.
• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation.
• AM/PM Podcast: Get weekly educational trainings on different aspects of E-Commerce, such as AI, TikTok Shop, and more, as well as keep up to date with everything that happens in Ecom with our Weekly Buzz news series. Don’t forget to subscribe on our YouTube Channel.