#185 – A Behind the Scenes Look at Building a 6 Figure Product for Less Than $5K – Bradley Sutton

Most regular listeners of this podcast know that Bradley Sutton’s day job is Director of Training and Chief Brand Evangelist for Helium 10. Still, if there was any confusion, it would be understandable.

Because, he’s everywhere. Live Facebook sessions for Helium 10 users, check! Webinars for Amazon sellers, check! Helium pro-training videos, check! Trending, viral blog posts, check!

Well, today on the Serious Sellers Podcast, we see one more facet of Bradley’s e-commerce skillset; Amazon case study scientist. 

Bradley spends a fair amount of time at his desk writing, podcasting and helping Helium 10 navigate through the waters of e-commerce. But he knows that the best way to really walk the Amazon seller’s walk, is to get out there in the trenches. Searching for, optimizing, then launching Amazon products has always been his first love, and in this podcast, he’s back at it.

 In episode 185 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 02:55 – How are the Original Project 5K Products Doing?
• 06:00 – Looking for One Great 5K Product
• 07:55 – Profitability Calculator Shows There’s Money to Be Made
• 08:30 – The “Maldives Honeymoon”   
• 11:00 – Benefitting from Amazon and Compound Words
• 13:35 – PPC Costs of 27 Cents a Click Helps
• 16:55 – Next Up – Looking to Black Box for an Interesting Keyword
• 19:10 – A PPC Test-Listing Shows Real Demand  
• 23:30 – This Time, a Slow and Steady Product Launch  
• 25:15 – Quality Control Issues Sidetrack Project 5K
• 28:50 – Keeping Things Real with Case Studies
• 32:30 – Project 5K – Practicing What We (Helium 10) Preach   

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, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
• Ultimate Resource Guide: Discover the best tools and services to help you dominate on Amazon.
• Helium 10: 20+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• 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. 
• SellerTradmarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.

Transcript

Bradley Sutton: Today, I’m going to give you guys an update on Project 5k, a case study where I launched 12 different products for less than $5,000. But now I also have two new Project 5k’s that I did, right. Each dedicated less than $5,000 to a new product launch. And these products are already slated to be six figure products. 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, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today I’ve got update for you guys on the Project 5k. If you guys want to go back to the original Project 5k episode, that was done a few weeks ago, so you can just search it in your podcast feed there, or you can go to helium10.com/podcast and type in Project 5k in the search. And you’ll see the original one. Now that was back in June, I had done a podcast episode, wrote a blog about a long term case study that I was doing called project 5k. Now in there, I want to show everybody that, Hey, you don’t need too much money to get started to sell on Amazon. You might think, wait a minute. Bradley, $5,000 is still a significant amount of money. But in that article and podcast I did, it was actually 12 different products I launched, not each for $5,000, but a total of $5,000. Some of those products I launched for only like five or $600. All right. So in this episode, I’m not going to call this like season 1.5 or season two, or Project 5k part D, or anything fancy like that. Project 5k to me is kind of like a movement. I don’t know if that’s being too corny, but it’s just like an ongoing thing I just want to keep doing, because I love inspiring people. And I hear so much that, Hey, you know, I’m working a full time job. I don’t have enough time to dedicate to Amazon, or I don’t have tens of thousands of dollars. I can’t get into it. I want to just show people that, Hey, it’s possible. Even if you have limited time, even if you have a limited budget to have success on Amazon. This is $5,000 guys. It’s not going to make you a million dollars in two months. And if you’ve got a guru telling you that, then you need to like unsubscribed from that guru on YouTube, or block them or report them for fraud or something like that. Because that’s not the reality. But if you have a few thousand dollars, these case studies that I’m doing, I hope are enough to show you that, Hey, it is possible to have some success on Amazon. Now, first of all, how were those original Project 5k products doing? So, in that original podcast in June, I reported that from the previous year October to May, the sales were about $17,500 with profit being about $3,000, right?

Bradley Sutton: Again, nobody got rich off of that, but it was a profitable project that we did right now, since then in June, we had about $6,000 gross sales. So, wow. In one month, we had about 30% of what the previous eight months had been. It was a pretty good month when things were getting back up and running during the COVID, right? And that was about a thousand dollars net profit. July went down to about $3,700 with $550 net profit. In August, it was $3,200 in gross sales with 300 net profit. And September it dipped down to $2,000 gross sales with $200 net profit. So, sales and profit went down as the summer months, but they picked up again in the first 10 days of October already had a thousand dollars of gross sales with 20% profit margins. Now, I’m expecting a big October for a couple of the products. There’s some holidays coming up that these products do very well in. And I’m also expecting some strong sales in November and December. So, can somebody quit their day job from this original Project 5k? No, of course not. But again, these products are actually pretty much taking care of themselves. I could be probably doing a lot better on them. If I would put more effort as is, I spend only maybe 20 minutes a week optimizing the PPC and that’s about it. I’m not like checking the keywords. I don’t even have market tracker running on them. This was just something I wanted to do for this person who wanted to invest money and just wanted to have some nice cashflow. I’m like, alright, let me see what I can do for you. But, over the next couple of months, I’m going to put a little bit more effort into it. Because now I feel bad because I’m probably leaving money on the table and it’s not my money, it’s their money. So, I want to do a little something for them. A little bit more, but Hey, having a profit of an average of what $500 the last few months is not bad for 20 minutes of work per week, which is pretty much all I’m putting into that account. 20 minutes of work. And it’s making about $500 of profit a month. Now, again, that first project 5k, I want to show that even if you’ve only got what 500 to a thousand dollars, there’s still a chance that you can have some success selling on Amazon, even under private label, I’m going to be launching actually two more products under that brand this week. And so, my update the first part of next year is going to talk about how Q4 worked out for those products plus the original 12 products.

Bradley Sutton: Now I’m going to be doing or talking about right now, a brand new product launch for 5k that I did, right. Now, instead of just launching a lot of sub $10 products. Like I did that first time. I wanted to do another case study though, where I took about $5,000 and put it all into one product. So, on this one, I started my research in black box by Helium 10. And, I actually ended up back on Etsy, went down a rabbit trail, ended up on Etsy, just like we did on Project X. Now, I hope you’re not getting confused on all these projects. These are all case studies. We’ve got Project X, we’ve got Project 5k, two different things. Right? Anyways, I found an interesting product. It seemed to have some pretty decent demand on Amazon. There was only one established competitor on Amazon Indonesia at the time. And yet the product that I had in mind that I kind of had the idea from Etsy was fundamentally a different kind of product. It was same kind of product, but like the customer avatar might not have considered the other competitor if they were considering mine and vice versa. So, I thought there was a niche for it. Now, I could actually see you in black box and brand analytics that there was a seller selling something similar to what I had in mind, but they hadn’t in stock for a while. But when I was using Helium 10 Xray, I could see the BSR and sales estimate history. And I was like, wait a minute. When this guy was in stock, it was a fairly decent seller. And he was selling in the forty. $40 range, you know, 40 to $50. And I was like, that’s a desirable price range. So, the first thing was, let me get a– not a shipping quote, but actually just a quote on production from the sourcing agent I use in China. She’s amazing. Her name is– shout out to Apple. Apple, you rock. The quote I got was $7 and 80 cents apiece. I’m like, you know what? That sounds pretty decent. I know what my shipping rates are going to be. So, what I do, I use the Chrome extension profitability calculator on just another random listing. And I change the dimensions around to what I thought the dimensions would be for this product. And then I put in my price, I’m like, you know what, I’m going to sell this for $40 and 99 cents. My manufacturing costs is about $7 and 80 cents. I’m paying about $450 per cubic meter to have something delivered to my door.

Bradley Sutton: And sure enough, I calculated it all out where my net profit would be $13 and 67 cents, 33%. Obviously it doesn’t take any consideration PPC, but I like seeing personally with the profitability calculator, things at least 30% minimum net margin. So I’m like, you know what, I’m going to pull the trigger on that. So, I sent the deposit about a month later, the product was ready to ship. I sent them the remainder of what I owed plus shipping to my warehouse and everything included was $1,500. The delivered price to my warehouse was about $4,300 total, right? Still room to spare under my $5,000 budget. Now my launch method, I’m going to give you guys a phrase you might have never heard of before. Because I just made it up this week. All right. I’ve been working on this for a while, but I never had a name for it, but I’m going to call this the Maldives honeymoon or Maldives honeymoon. I’m not sure how to pronounce it, but more on the origin of that phrase later in a few weeks or a month or so, once I finished all my case studies and I’m working on this project Maldives honeymoon, I’m going to go into detail on how I can put that name and the details of how it works from my studies. Because it’s still not done. It’s still too early to make a definitive conclusion on this. But anyways, for now I’m calling it the Maldives honeymoon. All right. And I’m sorry, I’m being such a tease, but I can’t get into detail yet because it’s an ongoing case study. But anyways, the main keyword that I knew for this product was going to generate probably at least 50% of the sales. It had about 4,000 searches, monthly searches at the time. So the CPR number, which is the number that Helium 10 gives, if you’re doing giveaways, how many you would need to give out over eight days, in order to give you the best chance to get to page one, it was about a hundred, but I have so much faith in my strategy, or I had so much faith in my Maldives honeymoon, I decided to do a search find buy campaign for only eight units, not a hundred, 8 for 4,000 searches. So, what I did was I used azrank.com. We’ve had them on the podcast before. A like Amazon, Z like zebra, rank.com. And I had them run the search find buy campaign. Because I don’t have time to make Facebook ads and send traffic to ManyChat, or any of those other methods. Right? So, what were the results? All right, check this out guys. As soon as the product went live, I was already ranking on page like two to three. By day three of that search find buy campaign, I had only given out what like three units. I was already at the top of page one position three. Day five, I was page one position one, even surpassing that one aforementioned established sellers, with eight units of search find buy on a 4,000 search volume keyword.

Bradley Sutton: Now, that wasn’t the only keyword I targeted during this launch. Now, the second keyword I targeted, it had only about 1400 monthly searches. Thus, the CPR was about 32. So, how many units do you think I “gave away” for this promotion, CPR 32. I gave away one unit. Now, that first keyword that I said was the target keyword, the main keyword, right? That’s a two word search term, right? Two-word search term, think like egg tray or egg holder, or something, right. Now, this other keyword that I’m talking about right now is also a two word search term. However, it’s like the second word is like a compound word that is an extension of the second word of that first one. Okay. I know that might have just confused you. So, check this out. It’s like, let’s say my first keyword was yellow flower. Well then, the second keyword I’m targeting is yellow sunflower, right? It’s still two words, but it’s a compound word and it has that other word as a root in it right? Now, again, this is just my speculation. It’s a little bit similar to my project Maldives that I’m doing, but I was hoping that Amazon could relate activity on this keyword to my first campaign a little bit and probably vice versa. And especially since I’m running both campaigns simultaneously, I mean, as much as you can say simultaneous since the other campaign only had one giveaway right? Now, how did my whopping one search-find-buy do? Alright, check this out. Day one, I was on page two to three. On day three. I got to page one and by day seven, I was page one position two. How cool is that? All right. I did a search find buy of one single unit to another keyword related to that first one. And it followed the same trajectory of getting to page one, position one to two by day five. Now, the rest of my search-find-buy strategies for that probably would be enough to knock your socks off. I’m going to go over it more in my Maldives honeymoon, upcoming article, but let’s just say another keyword that had over 15,000 monthly searches. I got to the top of page one with less than 10 giveaways as well. Now outside of the search-find-buy, what did I do for launch? Well, with the help of the ADS formed by Helium 10, that’s our PPC management software. I ran some pretty cool PPC campaigns using this strategy that we’ve talked about here on the show with Vince about having three campaigns. First of all, an auto, broad and an exact manual campaign supplemented with a product targeting campaign.

Bradley Sutton: Now, despite being a new launch, my overall aim costs was under 40%. Now, in the blog version of this, by the way, guys, if you go to helium10.com/blog, type in Project 5k, or just look in today’s blogs, you should see this blog that’s based on this podcast and I’ve got like screenshots there. If you want to see like my screenshots of Keyword Tracker, my screenshots of ads, so that you know I’m not making this stuff up. Anyways, I didn’t expect sales to get ramped up so fast. My ADS campaign, their total in the initial launch, like until I ran out of stock, right, of the first 500 units I spent $2,400 in PPC, gave me $6,300 of sales for an ACoS of 38%, generated 9,000 clicks on these campaigns with a cost per click of only 27 cents. And I got 140 plus PPC course from these PPC campaigns I generated with ads. Now, I did not expect to get sales ramped up so fast. So, unfortunately I sold out and only six weeks, those 500 units, right? Some stats from Helium 10 profits on the two SKUs. Now it may be like, why is there two SKUs? Why I always do a one FBA SKU and one FBM SKU, the gross revenue was $21,000. My expenses were $17,000. That includes cost of goods and all Amazon expenses and PPC, et cetera. So, the net profit was $4,400 for a 20% profit margin, not too shabby for a brand new launch, right? Over $4,000 net profit. Again, my initial investment was just under $5,000. Now sales are booming again, we’re back in stock. I did a lightning deal on it and sold 50 units one day. In the last six weeks, we’ve sold another 500 plus units grossing over $23,000 with a net profit of again, $4,300.

Bradley Sutton: Now, I’m using Helium 10 Inventory Management that we just launched, right? So, hopefully I’m not going to run out of stock again. There’s a chance I still might because like the very first day, I’ll never forget this. The very first day we launched the inventory management, I ran it on my account and it’s like, you need to order right now. And I was like, Oh shoot. So, I cut the order, right then I was actually ordering a little bit later than I should have. So, hopefully it was– I got the order in time to not run out again. But anyways, if this item stays in stock, it’s a product that is slated to gross about 150 to $200,000 a year with 30 to $40,000 of net profit. That’s not too bad for a less than $5,000 investment. Right. All right. That’s pretty cool, guys. This is doable stuff. I hope this kind of stuff gets you excited. All right. Because this is not rocket science, like, okay, you might be saying, Hey, Bradley, you’ve got some secret Maldives honeymoon nonsense that you’re running. Guys, that was just a part of my launch strategy, you know? And it’s not even proven yet. That’s why I’m still running case studies. It could have been a total fluke. All right. This kind of like got me on the radar of this Maldives honeymoon. It maybe is not even a thing though. I kind of think it is a thing because in my other test it’s showing me some stuff, but it’s definitely just a small part of the success of this product, the strategies they use, guys. It is stuff that we talk about here on the podcast. So, if we talk about in the freedom to get training by Helium 10 it’s stuff that anybody can do, all right. That’s the main thing I want to talk about. Now two months after that, I was like, you know what? I want to do a different project 5k in a completely different category that I don’t have experience in and with a completely different kind of product and a completely different brand. All right. So, about six weeks or so after that above case study, I started another one right? Now, product research for this one, I actually did only in Helium 10 Black Box. I didn’t look outside to Etsy and Pinterest on this one. So, I started off again doing a Black Box word search for something that had a low average number of reviews. But searches are around the 2000 to 6,000 search volume range.

Bradley Sutton: I want to keep something that had some demand, but wasn’t too crazy. And I came upon an interesting keyword. All right. I’m always like, wait a minute. This seems like it could be saturated. So I looked on it and there was a lot of like products on there that might not have seemed like it was completely relevant to that keyword. There’s only one real product on the first page that was at the top. I’m like, okay, this is the product that really defines this keyword. And these other are just kind of like stragglers here on page one. So, that kind of intrigued me, right. I, again, I felt that there’s only one true product that hit the needs of that keyword, but I’ll be honest, the sales weren’t that great at the time that I looked at it, it was doing maybe like two to three units, a day of sales, but I liked the price point of it was over $40. And plus I liked how during the holidays and during Q4, it was a really good selling product. And sales were jumping to like 20 a day during November and December. Now, this competitor actually seemed to have a pretty decent following in social media. They had some products in the vendor central program. I’ve seen them on other websites. So I was like, you know what? Challenge accepted. A lot of people shy away from a competitor like that, but I was like, this is just one guy, I don’t think they’re Amazon strategies that great. I’m looking at their listing. They’re obvious Amazon amateurs. They’re out there using Helium 10. Otherwise they would have seen their listing scores in that. Great. All right. So I’m like, you know what, I think I can take these guys on, this will be my new challenge. I want to try like a slow and steady method on this one instead of like a bum rush, like I did on that first product. So, all these things I was talking about though, it’s still a little bit doubtful. There’s a lot of factors that didn’t leave me as confident in this product as that last one. That last product, I actually didn’t do a PPC listing on because I was like 1000000000% positive that I was going to do well. And like I had done a test listing on a similar product before that I decided not to do, but so I already had some data. So, I didn’t even do a PPC test listing on other product. This one, I was like, you know what, I’m a little bit doubtful. Let me strengthen up my validation here and strengthen up my confidence by running a PPC test listing. And so I used the Project X method of that. I bought a couple of similar products.

Bradley Sutton: I throw them up on Amazon. This one, I only did fulfilled by merchant. And I was like, I just did a really poor listing. I just want to have the keywords in there, a couple images. I had a, what else did I do? Oh yeah. And of course I ran the PPC campaign and I put the price at like, I forgot it was like $110 or something. Remember, this is a $40 product. I put it up for 110. Because I was like, you know what? I don’t want this to really sell. I would like to see people click $110 product that’s like this. And just so I can see some data on my PPC. Right? And I can see impressions and et cetera, but check this out. Those two units I had in stock, they sold out in three days at $110. So, thank goodness, after those three days, I already had some good PPC data that already gave me a little bit of confidence, but any confidence I was having, and if I should launch this pretty much went out the door. When I could see that I could sell two units in three days at $110. Okay, if I can do that, I’m pretty sure I can sell at least a couple units a day, if not more at $40 with a really nice looking listing. Right? So I put in my order, the total for the 500 units was about 3,500 bucks. And the shipping to my warehouse came out to a thousand dollars. Again, under budget on Project 5k. Now, I did a similar launch as that first product I talked about, and I’m going to get more into that. And again, in my Maldives honeymoon writeup. Now this launch, it’s a little bit normal or average than the other one, when you first launch, you’re usually not profitable right away. Like I was in that first product, right. It took me about like 250 ,300 units of sales for me to start breaking a profit, like on the year to date sales on this product, because the PPC was pretty expensive. All right. Why was it so expensive? Why was it different than other one? Well, like I said, I didn’t have like this superstar keyword that I knew I was going to get all my sales from. There was a keyword that I knew I would be relevant for. And then just a whole bunch of other keywords that different products were getting sales from. And I’m having to kind of convince buyers that, Hey, you might’ve been looking for this other kind of product, but take a look at mine and see what you think.

Bradley Sutton: I think this might hit your needs. So, it’s more of an uphill battle on this one. Now, I also had a higher budget on my PPC again, because I’m trying to go for more keywords. Because I really didn’t know which keywords buyers would find relevant for this listing because that other product, like I said, it wasn’t really performing that well on that many keywords, which by itself is one of the reasons why I chose this product because that competitor really didn’t have a lot of keywords that were working well for it. I thought, you know what? I’m going to spend the money in PPC and find some more keywords. Now, I’m not sold out yet of those first 500 units. I got about a hundred left and I have another order of 700 on the way. That’s hopefully going to arrive in time for the holiday rush. Now, just right here in October profit last week, it was about 15%. So again, I’m already, I’m still technically, I don’t know. Some people consider their launch phase, their first couple months or their first shipment. So, technically I’m in launch. So it’s kind of cool that I’m profitable already 15%, like I said last week. And I want to increase that a little bit now. Here’s the cool thing though. The remember the only other guy I’m competing against, I’m already outselling him four to one, right? So, I’m like of this type of product of which there’s only like two, maybe three. Now I am outselling number two, who has been on Amazon for a long time and has a good relationship with Amazon and is all over the internet and all over social media, I’m outselling him four to one, right? But again, in this Project 5k product, I’m doing this slow and steady approach with hopes for a fairly lucrative Q4. So, my goal guys is I want to try and launch like one different project 5k product every month and document it for you guys so that you can see that you do not need huge amounts of money to have success on Amazon, right? You do not need huge amounts of money to have success on Amazon. I’m going to say it again. What’s my TST, or my 30-second tip for the day. My 30-second tip is kind of like that part of the launch strategy. I talked about earlier, where it’s like, go after multiple keywords in your initial launch, even if they’re low search volume, but make them kind of variations of that core keyword that you’re trying to launch. So, if the keyword is like egg holder, go after a holder, but go after chicken egg holder. Go after egg holder countertop, go after egg holder for women or whatever keyword that you want, but that has that egg holder in it and have those working off of each other. So, you can get residual bumps on your keyword launch. All right. Now, back to my plans for the next couple of months, I said, I’m trying to launch some more Project 5k products. I just barely launched one like a couple days ago that I have like up and running right now. I’m not even sure if it’s going to work out well. And I’m going to document this in the next episode, because like I said, guys on Amazon, you’ve got failures sometimes and things that don’t work out now, my launch is just ridiculous. Like, if anything proves the Maldives honeymoon, it’s this latest launch I just did this week. However, that being said, I’m not sure how this is going to work out because half of the 500 products that I was shipped for this are defective. I’m like, guys, are you serious? Did you seriously not inspect the shipment? Like I told you to do? Now, I’ve got a good relationship with my sourcing agent there. And she’s talking to the factory to get me like those 250 units to replace, but that’s going to suck. I only have 250 units and I know I’m going to sell out fairly fast of these. And the other stuff is not going to get to me for like another eight weeks. So, that kind of sucks. I’m going to miss a big chunk of Q4, if not all of Q4 because of that, but still I’m still launching it. It’s going to be on the same brand as that first case study product that I launched that’s doing so well. So, we’ve got that one going, I’ve got two more products that are going to go on that brand that actually just arrived almost at the same time.

Bradley Sutton: And I’m going to be launching those in the next couple of weeks. Another product arrived this week. All these products I had spaced out, but this thinking factories were like completing them all different times. And, and the shipping was all over the place. Again, I’ll talk about these issues in the next podcast episode, updated Project 5k, but this other one, I’m super worried about. I only opened one case of this new product. I only opened one case and I opened up five boxes, which were in there, a hundred percent defective. I’m like guys, I don’t know. So if you had your eight year old nephew working instead of you, but this factory did a terrible job, like I couldn’t even look at the rest of the boxes. I’m like, do not tell me that the entire shipment of actually there’s only 300 units on this shipment. I was like, do not tell me that the entire shipment of 300 units is all defective because that’s going to suck. So, that one might not be able to launch for another project 5k. But again, the factory is hopefully going to replace that for me, if they all turn out to be defective, but we’ll see. Tomorrow, I’m going to go back to my warehouse and hopefully with a better attitude, I’m going to open these up and I’m optimistic that hopefully at least half of these can be salvaged, but that means I only have 150 units. So again, thanks for nothing factory who screwed me over. But anyways, that’s beside the point. Guys, that’s real life. Sometimes things happen and your best laid plans might not work out. It just goes over the fact that, Hey, pay the extra money to have the inspections. I did not do that for these other ones because I was in such a hurry. I’m like, no, just take a look at a couple and then send it over. Because everything that those factories had been sending me was pretty darn good. You know? So I’m like, alright, I haven’t gotten any complaints. Go ahead. And just– if you feel comfortable, send it over, but that’s what happens when you try and take shortcuts and don’t do the inspection and it turned out bad. And I’m not going to lose money on this other than loss sales for that second product, that one that I had launched that one, that’s a slow and steady. I actually have two or three more products on the way from China right now that I’m going to launch on that brand. And the reason why I’m doing that is because I’m like, okay, this is like a kind of like trajectory here.

Bradley Sutton: I’m going to get brand registry on this. And then I’m going to have three different SKUs so I can do sponsored brand ads now. All right. So that’s where I’m going. That’s my plan there. Unfortunately, these products I found the factory took so long. It’s a different factory, by the way, you guys. The factory took so long to produce them that like seven or eight other competitors jumped on. So again, this is real life guys. This is real life. What happened? You might have an amazing idea. And in the time that it takes to get your products, a bunch of other competitors might pop up. I’m not giving up on this. This is what happened. So, I want you guys to be able to, if this happens to you, I want you guys to be able to look at whatever I do on this and see what works and see what doesn’t work. So, that’s another thing to be looking forward to in the next Project 5k episode. Now, by then, I hope to have at least like seven or eight total Project 5k products, and let’s see what kind of gross revenue we’re building just from this. All right, again, guys, am I doing this full time? Heck no, you guys know what my day job is. My official actual title is, well, I have to– I’m the, obviously the host of the serious sellers podcast, I would say that takes up. I don’t know, three, four hours a week of my time. All right. But the 90% of my time is, which is probably another 40 to 50 hours a week. I’m spending doing my regular job. I’m the Director of Training and also the Chief Evangelist at Helium 10. I oversee the training and the content departments. I’m in that more than eight hours a day. That’s like my passion. I love working with my team. And I love my job of what I do. That’s my main responsibility on Amazon. Now, these case studies, I’m just doing, when I have some spare time here or there, because as a content and training director, I need to keep my knowledge with Amazon up to date. I can’t be giving you guys strategies that work in 2018, right? So, I’m like only spending what, two, three, four, five hours a week, maybe on these things. Okay. And again, each of these projects started with only $5,000. Now, why am I mentioning this? It’s because how many times have I heard out there excuses? Why aren’t you starting an Amazon? Well, I still have a day job. I’m working full time. I really don’t have the time to dedicate to Amazon, the time that it’s going to take for me to be successful, or the other thing is, you know, I don’t have 10,000. I don’t have $20,000 in my bank account. I’ve only got like $4,000, 5,000. I don’t have enough money to make it on Amazon guys enough with that nonsense excuses, I’m living proof. All right, I’ve got a “full time job”. I’m spending more than 40 hours a week at my job because I love it so much. I spend more than 40 hours a week on my job, and I still have time four to five hours a week to put into the Amazon side of things. And I can still build something that is somewhat successful. The other part of this guys is the money.

Bradley Sutton: I don’t have $20,000 in my bank account to just do a little pet project study, you know? No, but I was like, you know what, I’m going to go ahead and put $4,000 down on this. I can manage that. And because of that, I was able to generate money that allowed me to do even another project the next month. So guys, again, don’t use those excuses about time and money, because this is proof that it can be done without loads and loads of both of those things. All right. And again, my strategies that I’m using, it’s not some like super top secret thing that’s only been shared in the Helium 10 Elite group that only eight figure sellers know guys that 95% of what I did is exactly what I teach here on the podcast. What I teach in the training videos and Helium 10, what Kevin King teaches in freedom ticket, what Tim Jordan and I taught in Project X where we have in our blogs. I mean, this is just bread and butter strategies, guys. I’m not doing that much that special, right? Anybody could have done what I did. Anybody who has taken the Freedom Ticket course or anybody who’s using Helium 10, because that’s all used. That’s the only tool I use Helium 10 to do all of this. So guys, if you’re not a Helium 10 member yet, or you’re not selling on Amazon, use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount, try it out for free 50% off for the first month. And I want you to start your own project 5k, right? So, use the discount code SSP 50. That’s SSP 50, sign up for the free account at Helium 10, and then just say, Hey, let me upgrade to the platinum plan with this 50% off coupon for the first month. SSP 50 and dig into the training, dig into Freedom Ticket, dig into Project X, dig into the tools. These are the exact things that helped me launch 12 products for $5,000 last year that helped me launch two more products for $5,000 each year, that are both already projected to be six figure a year products. Guys, anybody can do this. I want you to do it because I want to be able to bring you on the podcast like in a year or so. And I want you to be able to tell me, Hey Bradley, I took your advice. I had $3,000. I had 4,000, I had $5,000, whatever I made my own Project 5k, and look at what I’m doing now. So now guys, this is the second episode of Project 5k that I’ve talked about. And I hope this is going to be an ongoing series.

Bradley Sutton: On the next episode maybe, I’ll give you guys another update of how Q4 was maybe around January or February or so. And let’s see how these other product launches I have done work and guys make sure to send me your updates on what you’re even if you’re starting just right now, don’t forget. Keep me updated, go to my Instagram @H10Bradley. H10Bradley. I will love to hear what kind of projects you’re working on. And hopefully you got inspired by something you heard today. So, make sure to do that. Guys, don’t forget to leave us a review if you’re listening on Apple podcasts or I’m not sure if there’s reviews on Spotify, but if you’re leaving a review on Spotify, that would be great. If there is a such thing, at least follow us, subscribe, we will see you guys on the next episode.