Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
The New Rules of Selling on Amazon in 2026 with Neil Twa
Amazon’s rules changed—and that’s good news if you know how to play the new game. We sat down with Neil Twak, co-founder of Voltage Holdings and Cayman Data, to unpack why algorithm shifts have compressed launch windows to roughly 30 days, how structured data now acts like a prompt into Amazon’s Cosmo engine, and why intent beats keywords for ranking and profitable growth. Neil makes a clear case for relaunching weak ASINs over reviving old reviews, and he explains how to train the algorithm with PPC while optimizing for tacos, not ACOS.
We dig into pricing strategy and brand defensibility in a world of rising fees and policy risk. The winning move is to build in tier two and tier three price bands—$50 to $500—protect at least $12 per-unit profit, target 40 percent ROI, and turn inventory four times a year. That math lets you buy customers aggressively while maintaining healthy margins. Neil also maps a practical channel sequence: capture demand first on Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop, then graduate to Shopify demand creation when your numbers justify the lift. You’ll hear why TikTok’s GMV Max ads preview Amazon’s future, and how display and DSP can send qualified traffic to your DTC store without breaking terms.
Data is the moat. Neil pulls back the curtain on Cayman Data’s intelligence engine that identifies the small set of customer needs driving most of Amazon’s revenue and greenlights product plays that slot into real demand. The big mindset shift: adopt portfolio thinking, validate fast with structured data and lean bundles, then double down only on the SKUs the market proves. If you’re stuck in mid six to low seven figures, the unlock is moving from micro-ops to CEO mode—deploy capital faster, tighten cash cycles, and manage by tacos, ROI, and inventory turns.
Ready to future-proof your brand and grow profitably on Amazon in 2026? Follow the show, share this episode with a seller who needs it, and leave a quick review with your top insight. Your feedback helps us bring more sharp operators to the mic.
Ready to scale your Amazon business? Click here to book a strategy call. https://calendly.com/firingtheman/amazon
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income stream in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts, serial entrepreneurs, David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
SPEAKER_01:What's up everyone, and welcome back to the Firing the Man podcast. Today's guest is someone who has been deep in the Amazon ecosystem long before it was cool. And more importantly, he's still winning while most sellers are struggling to keep up. I'm joined by Neil Twak, the co-founder of Voltage Holdings and Cayman Data, longtime Amazon strategist and a guy who's worked with brands, aggregators, and operators navigating real money, real scale, and real risk. Neil helps sellers build actual businesses, not hype projects, using data-driven strategy, disciplined execution, and systems that survive platform changes. And if you felt like Amazon has gotten harder, noisier, and less forgiving over the last few years, you're not wrong. In this episode, we're digging into the state of Amazon in 2026, what's broken, what's overplayed, and what's actually working right now for sellers who are still growing profitably. We're talking about brand defensibility, smarter data usage, portfolio thinking, and how operators should be adjusting their playbook as Amazon continues to mature. We'll also talk about what Neil and his team are building at Cayman Data, including how they help serious sellers and business builders think beyond just launching SKUs and instead design businesses that are built to last. If you sell on Amazon or plan to sell on Amazon or are trying to future-proof your business in an environment that keeps changing the rules, this is an episode you'll want to listen to all the way through. Let's get into it. Neil, welcome to the show. Hey David, thanks for having me back, brother. Absolutely, absolutely. I'd like to let you know you are part of an elite group of second-time guests. Yeah, absolutely. So welcome back to the show. Uh Neil, really looking forward to this conversation. You've been in the Amazon game for a long time. From your seat today, what has what is fundamentally different about Amazon in 2026 compared to even three or four years ago? And what sellers are still in denial about that shift?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, man, the great question. And I think, you know, just to clarify my understanding of obviously Amazon is one sales channel, and we talk about it a lot, and it's a uh you know, conflict marketing conversation for some folks listening to this right now about whether they love or hate it. Um and it is, by my uh definition, just a single sales channel as part of an omnichannel e-commerce company. So as an e-commerce company servicing that channel uh along with TikTok and Shopify and retail, I kind of want to draw out some of the pros and cons and why we start there and then move into those other channels and why that's relevant even in 2026, I think more than it was relevant in the last five to six years. In fact, I'll go back and get my Wayback Machine for a second and tell you I'm seeing opportunity right now that I haven't seen since 2014. Um so what people don't necessarily understand is this ecosystem because it has gotten more complex to get in. We really think you need to be, you know, acting like a professional seller, a business person if you're gonna start any sales channel, a TikTok shop or otherwise, uh, and and always never treat business like a side hustle or a hobby. Well, you might start it on the side and do that, you should always really be thinking with the end in mind, which is how I build a multi-channel business to a you know potentially seven-figure exit. So, with that caveat in mind to answering your question, so we can kind of pre-frame what I'm about to say next, um, is Amazon a growing opportunity this year? And the answer is yes. And the question is, why do I think that? The amount of applications in 2023 was uh around uh 1.2 million people who were coming onto Amazon. That dropped to around 800,000 in 2024 and then went below two, 400,000 uh in the last year. And I've last checked, I heard there's only about 25,000. What does that mean? It means it's gotten more competitive and difficult for people to understand how to get started on that channel. Uh Amazon has let a number of other seller types from other countries get on there and jack things up in terms of pricing, race to the bottom, pricing, competition, and what people view as saturation, which is actually just competitive branding. Uh and really what it did was it caused this kind of what I'm gonna call almost a dead count bounce in Amazon that's now forcing them to go back to the playbook of luring in Amazon sellers who are US-based businesses. And so they are coming very hard and fast on programs and initiatives to push U.S. businesses to the forefront of the platform. Um, they call it the NSI plus initiative, new seller initiative. We're part of that. It used to be called launch patent. And what it means is that they're really pushing for sellers who have brands, are U.S. based and can develop those brands very quickly with successful product lines uh into the platform. And because of the uh lacking a seller base that has suddenly disappeared from U.S. sellers who found the competition too difficult or to get into from a small person perspective, if you will. And of course, the the you know issues with uh other uh countries who shall not be named, uh the Dark Lord, we all know them, uh coming in and just kind of play around and destroying everything. I don't want to get hit by algorithms on the on this podcast, so you know, getting your reach doesn't get killed, but certain um yeah, countries, and now they have basically been stopped uh because their revenue uh system, I forget what it's called in in that location, has um forced them to report their taxes, which has now forced most of them uh to not be able to sell in the U.S. We pretty much just cut them off, bam. And there's uh about 800 I last saw, David, that have moved to Hong Kong to try to avoid that. So it's only about 800, uh, which means the rest of them in there right now are running out of product, and as soon as the product runs out, they're not gonna come back. They can't afford to come back. So there's this huge gaping hole of opportunities with um what I'm calling secondary and tertiary brands. Primary brands that have been in there for a while, but the secondary and tertiary are disappearing. And there's this huge gap we've identified in that market of customer need and demand that is just wide open right now for anybody to take advantage of and deploy capital, go straight in if you know the right data, the right approach to that, and the way to use the system today, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. We're launching brands that in 30 to 60 days are going down$1 million run rate. I have not seen that since 2014, 15, and 16 before the whole drop shipping and conundrum actually occurred. And there's a myriad of things that are occurring in that, many of which I just explained, including the shift to algorithmic AI-driven uh structured data, which is basically now launching products like a giant prompt.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:We're launching products like a giant data prompt now into the AI engine. So I care less about the product, which is a part of the brand building process, and which doesn't mean I'm gonna launch a cheap, crappy product. It means I'm not gonna put as much effort into the product yet because I can now quickly define the data set. I can quickly define that customer need and intent out of sales. And then I can go say, oh, now I need to put money into that product. I need to get the right product packaging, design, and business in place. And then I need to do a full product launch now that I just proved I can sell the crap out of it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's really interesting. And I I would imagine that definitely speeds up your launch process.
SPEAKER_03:It has increased it tremendously because the timeframes by which we're moving product are literally shifting backwards in time. Everybody you realized they went out to a long time, especially during the 2020, 2025 timeframe. They extended out for weeks to months, right? Way out there. But those timeframes, due to the strength of certain manufacturers that have come to the top, the smaller ones that were manufacturing and basically only had their base of sales in America by fleecing the system, are now falling out of the system. So only the strongest manufacturers are staying online. The ones that can deliver, have the most product pipeline, and need you to sell their products, right? And with that, they can move faster. They can give lower uh, you know, buy-in rates instead of 70, 30. We're coming in on some that are willing to do it at 0% right out of the gate. So we're able to move that product much, much faster now than we were able to. And this is a window of time before it it changes again. But with that growth and structure, you're seeing us have you know have the ability to launch a product on its on a run rate to a million in sales within 90 days, 12 weeks.
SPEAKER_01:Interesting. That's that's really interesting and and and hopeful. Hopefully for the future.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah, I know it's very optimistic. I I'm super optimistic about it. Yeah. I'm launching a lot of product and brand right now. So I'm I'm hoping that all of the things I'm seeing and telling you about not only are true, but we're witnessing them in the data. And I just want to keep seeing that actually continue to prove itself out in the data farther and farther as we go along. And right now everything is signaling major changes are ahead, huge opportunity.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely. So for the people that aren't hopeful, for the people that are saying Amazon is dead, when it really means that their old playbook has stopped working.
SPEAKER_03:It was two years ago. It was last year, okay. And I don't mean that because we're just literally uh my brain still says last year is 2024. So I'm still not quite caught up yet with the whole change of our, you know, this new we're we're living in 2026, by the way. Yeah. I have to remind myself of that because it's moving so fast. But no, it it with the systems of AI, the shift, right? I know everybody talks about it and they don't really understand it, but they have to get some fundamental thing grasped. Elon is telling people that doctors are irrelevant in six years. The systems are telling you that job, certain job types and other things are irrelevant in three to five years, that warehousing and service-based businesses and stuff are going to be out uh on their butt because there's just gonna be most of those jobs are gonna be replaced. What we're looking at is not just an e-comm channel issue, it's a change in the way we do business. It is a fundamental change, which means opportunity can be created. Victims can be created out of that too, of course. But opportunity can be created during this time frame as well. Is Amazon dead? To some degree, if your products and timelines are still based on two-year-old data, you're out of date. If you have listings that have been selling for two years, they're probably out of date. Here's the thing: we launched four product relaunches in the last quarter of 2025 to prove something had changed in the algorithm. We had seen it change within the way Amazon is uh curating timelines for product launches and looking at certain product types and whether or not they'd made major shifts to their algorithms. And this happens every once in a while. It went from A9 to Cosmo about three, four years ago, and that was a major shift. And we're seeing another major shift as that new data set that has spent the last three years curating, and with Rufus, it's piling all this information into this model. It's getting stronger and stronger. They made another shift. You probably realize this too, but um, they made another shift. And it was about six weeks ago, actually, it was like 12 weeks now. And we we saw some products that were doing really well, and we could not understand with every level and change and then price point and and you know, image stack change and any lever we were pushing, and some of you might feel like this was not working. Any ad changes were not working. It just seemed like we could not figure out what to do with these products. Why were why was the data just dying? Right. And people would look at that and say, well, Amazon's dead, there's no opportunity. And you could say that, but I have so much other data over here or things that were working extremely well. I just couldn't understand why these particular niches and product types were not doing really well. So we ended up taking the first one, we pulled it out of Amazon, very dramatic. We pulled all the product back to a 3PL with one of our partners. We rebundled everything, packaged it, labeled it, launched a brand new ASIN uh under the uh under a new, you know, flat file Cosmo layout with a few extra data points that they re-incorporated back in there. We put that product back in the system. We ended up with a couple reviews and it took off two, three thousand a day in sales. And we're like, what is happening? In the first 30 days, it just went right. And we we were like, okay, something's changed, not enough proof yet. So we ended up taking one of the other products in a different brand, different company. I have 24 companies, by the way. And we took one of those and we pulled it back and we said, let's do this again. We did. Okay, same result. This time, this one had five, 10 reviews and it's shooting past three, four, five thousand a day. And we're like, what is in the first 30 days? We're like, what is going on? Right. So that's two, not yet statistically relevant. So we did three and we did four. So we're getting much closer to you know statistical relevance. I've got three other product types going to market right now that will just, you know, by the time I get to 10, I'll be able to say without a with a definitive answer, something significantly changed. But right now I'm 80% confident that the algorithmic attribution window that used to be 90 days is now 30 days. Okay. Okay. That the launch windows are back to that 714 and 30-day window we were plowing through in 2015, that I can take any product with a structured data set and go beat competition all day and twice on Sunday now, relaunching products or putting new products in the market under this new algorithmic change. Because we used to have to wait for 60 to up to 60 to 90 days to see certain levers of mechanics change and push and watch the organic and our tacos come down and all this stuff. And we planned everything for a long time around a 90-day product launch. We're not doing that anymore. We're planning around a 30-day. What does that mean? Long story. To say opportunity is crazy right now for launching products in the right way with the right framework. It absolutely is. The data is everything at this point. I am no longer looking at the product anymore in relationship to the customer. I'm looking at the data in relationship to my new customer, which is the Cosmo and ranking engines of the online world. It is the AI systems of the world, including Amazon, and I am launching structured data into those systems because it is selling the product to the customer. I'm no longer doing that.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I I want to dive a little deeper on this relaunch, and I why don't you take the other side of this? Okay. Uh but Neil, you you're taking down a seasoned listing with a lot of reviews.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you're completely up to 200 reviews.
SPEAKER_01:You're abandoning that.
SPEAKER_03:That's right.
SPEAKER_01:Abandon all hope. Yeah. What what so and I actually I am, I have a couple listings that I put as inactive about five years ago. They've got two or three hundred reviews, solid reviews. I had a supplier issue. I am bringing those back from the dead as I found a new supplier. And what you you're saying that is not not the move. We would be better off with a new relaunch.
SPEAKER_03:Well you would yes, I would say that you would want to test relaunch that under a completely new ACEN, update your structured data files, optimize them specifically for customer need and intent under the Cosmo engine. Um if you don't know what that means, it's a different way of looking at the data than most people understand. And then put that in there with zero reviews.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:You mentioned you mentioned a Cosmo flat file. What fields are now important that were never there before or are now relevant?
SPEAKER_03:So with some of the secret sauce, I can't tell you, dude, because it's behind my NDA. But the long story is there's about five other columns you can add into the flat file that Amazon doesn't tell you about. And yep. So those extra data files, along with the way you structure the current data file, the flat file of columns they show you, are really geared towards the customer need and customer intent of that product. Everyone's been elevating their keywords still and they miss it. If you're still talking about keywords or listening to your coach or people or stuff talk about keywords, you're already behind. You're a year to two behind what's actually happened. We no longer talk keywords. Keywords are just a way to build a cloud of a what we call a word-crushing cloud of a composite listing that the ultimate outcome is what is the customer need and intent of that product. And do I know it by name as defined by Amazon? And do I understand as this definition of Amazon that I'm building my structure of data in my flat file to align exactly with that customer need and its customer intent outcomes? Why? It's the prompt that gets you the right image in the mind of the LLM. It's the prompt that gets the person to look like you want. You ever prompted any of these tools out here now, the, you know, right, GPT and Sora or any of the other tools, you've been using any of those to do that. And you know, Nana Banana, the biggest one right now, uh Gemini 2.5. Um, you know that you can get the wrong image if you prompt it wrong. It'll give you the wrong framework, the wrong resolution. It'll put six fingers instead of four, it'll or five, it'll change things and screw up the scenes, and you know this, and you'll go back and mess with the prompt a bunch of times until you get it to put the right image in place. You can't do that with Cosmo in this way when you launch a product. If you do it wrong, you get the wrong image, you built the wrong uh understanding in that large language model of your product's use and intent for its current customer demand in the platform, and then you can't take it back. You only get it when you launch that first time that first platform goes live on that ASIN. Okay. After that, have you ever tried to retweak an image in a product and keep going through the prompts and it won't do it and won't do it, and so you finally give up and go back to a new chat and start again? Yes. Okay. Anybody who's listening to me who's ever tried that, that's exactly what's happening in Cosmo. Every time you go in and keep trying to change that, all you're doing is reconfusing the engine as to the purpose and intent of your product, and you're actually building a negative effect.
SPEAKER_01:Got it.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So now if we okay, this is what's happening, guys. The engines are basically looking at your structured data and saying, Do I know exactly who you are from the very beginning? So I create the exact audience overlap for an existing customer in demand that says your product is the right one. If you do that right from the beginning, it will know exactly who to put your product in front of it because it's now an intelligent marketing engine. It doesn't need you anymore to tell it what it wants. It already knows. And if you're still trying to tell it through keywords and other things, you're already behind. You already missed the boat. If you structure that correctly from the very beginning, the whole launch process changes. And the reason it changes is because you got the right data in front of the right product segment in front of the right customer audience.
SPEAKER_01:Got it. Got it. With the decreased focus on keywords, what is how does this impact PPC and your overall PPC strategy?
SPEAKER_03:Well, PPC keywords are just used as a way to train towards that customer intent. So while their engine currently still shows PPC keywords, broad match, et cetera, I will tell you where it's going. It is going where TikTok already went. In GMV Max ads last year, TikTok no longer allows you to drive your own customer uh uh intent, age, interest, et cetera, on your TikTok shop um platform advertising. You may not know that because you may not be there for those who are listening, but understand what they did. They took all of that away. It's literally an auto campaign called GMV Max Ads. It is based on the intent of the videos you give it from creators only. And that video that is read, listened, and intermined by their LLM audience marketing engine then pushes ads out from GMV Max ads. You can't train it any other way than the content you put into it. So they literally have a giant auto campaign. That's it. That's all you can do to target TikTok shop ads. So where where is Amazon going? Pretty soon. Mark my words, they will get rid of keyword targeting. in the advertising campaigns because they don't need you anymore to do it. So right now, you're basically using keyword targeting and advertising is what is going to be the last mile for the engine training component of ads and putting them in front of advertising because they will no longer need that soon.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yep. We could have a whole separate episode on this, but I'm curious on a on a healthy brand, uh tacos, which is the percentage of ad spend divided by revenue for our listeners, what where do you what it what would be a healthy tacos? 15% or lower. Got it. Okay. All right. That's helpful. That's helpful.
SPEAKER_03:Knowledge more important metric. Can I ask that question? No. Uh tacos is a yeah. Let me say this a different way. What is the least important metric that most people talk about as the most important metric? ACOS. ACOS, right. So right way so those who are listening to this right now who are fighting that ACOS battle and want someone to come in and give them 15%, 50%, 20%, 30% A cost to achieve a 15% tacos are going to lose. I I I agree. Okay so if I want a 15% tacos here's the here's the reverse of that. What does my A cost need to be?
SPEAKER_01:It depends on what your your breakdown of of uh PPC versus Ryan I will answer very simply whatever it needs to be. Yeah. Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Well said whatever it needs to be. So for those of you who are listening to this please understand what I just said. I'm going to try to say this as simply as I can I don't care what my A cost is. You do and you've been taught to and that's one of the bigger differentiators why you're going to lose against somebody like me in the market. I care about tacos. I don't care if my ACOS is 85% and I'm acquiring those customers away from you and the market share because ultimately the algorithm is going to reward me in time through optimizations and organic ranking till my tacos gets to 15% it only cares that I acquired that customer. I care about the ACOS because why? Well Neil I can't do more than 30% because I'm selling a$27 product you're already host, right? You've already started on the wrong foot with the wrong question. Okay. So the question then becomes how do I get to that Neil? How do I not care about my ACOS? You have to launch products that are$50 to$500 in retail price point that have a minimum of$12 in profit or greater and have an ROI of 40% or higher. And you need to churn those four times a year.
SPEAKER_01:I like it. I like it.
SPEAKER_03:Those are the real metrics you should be considering.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. I I really like that. And to anyone that's running an Amazon store you should hit pause and rewind and listen to that again because there's a lot of really good nuggets there.
SPEAKER_03:So you're going to be fighting a losing battle against the market and you will eventually give up and quit. Until you launch additional products that are higher and can achieve whatever A cost is required to get that sale. If you can't buy if you can't buy a customer you will not win in business. It's that simple and if you think I'm going to acquire a customer at the cheapest amount possible you're still going to lose it is I need to acquire that customer and figure out what it takes to get that customer and then do the rest of the work to ensure you can get your tacos to 15%. Absolutely my tacos might even be 25% but I prefer 15. If it's 25 and all the business works because all the numbers work then it doesn't matter I'm still acquiring the business. It's just a matter of do the numbers math can I stay at 15 to 20% net profit on the bottom line while doing that.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely absolutely if someone is launching or scaling a brand today, where do you see sellers wasting the most money? Is it ads, tools, agencies, launches and and where should the capital be going instead?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah I would say it would be anytime thinking that AI is going to save your business, growth hacks actually do anything to impact the things we just talked about and instead they need to be focused on the fundamentals of business first. So they need to actually stop taking courses and listening to hopium guru mindsets and podcasters and they need to actually implement the processes and fundamentals of changing a business you know or a side hustle into a business because many of them who are still writing on a single Amazon channel consider that a business. I don't right that is still a sales channel. If you're listening to this and you're thinking well Neil I haven't got to six figures on Amazon yet that's fine. You're still building your business you you don't actually have a complete business just yet. I know that hurts some people's feelings because others are telling them they're running an Amazon business. No you're not you're running an Amazon sales channel. Your business is the fundamentals. So yeah you have like I got to ask a question there I want to cut you off.
SPEAKER_01:I'm on the edge of my seat here. You've talked about this a couple times and I think it's worth diving into is is the the business versus just the sales channel. And and you've talked about sales channel expansion. Now there are a laundry list of sales channels that you could expand into but you know as you're coaching your students if they start on Amazon what's number two three and four and why?
SPEAKER_03:For us it's Walmart because I have a channel partnership that wipe gloves them straight into there uses MCF and it's just a really easy sales channel partnership for them to work directly with Walmart HQ. The second one or probably close second is TikTok shop because the products that we launch within our methodology are already validated for TikTok. Now you're maybe it's a psychology of a buyer in terms of which channel you go to and this is why I put this structure in place and you may not necessarily do exactly this because you might have a product that doesn't fit in certain channels because the psychology of that buyer channel doesn't really match with the larger value of the demographic you're targeting with your product, right? Like selling hardware to Macy's okay it's very different than if you got beauty products and whether you should go to Macy's dot com or something, right? So the end result is yeah TikTok shop and then you know platform by platform first to gather all the available demand for that product I can get first. Everybody confuses demand capture with demand creation. We've talked about that before I believe with TikTok shop and Amazon I can get demand creation. Even Walmart is demand creation. It's there it exists. It's already in their ecosystem it's baked into the cake it's the lowest hanging fruit to get my sales validated across multiple channels to get my psychology of my buyer and my product across multiple channels right from there then I'm actually looking at demand creation on the platform for content with TikTok, but I can also get demand from my existing product through there. So it's a bit of a hybrid, right? Which is kind of cool. But if you're going to go out to say like a Shopify store next or your website, that's all demand creation. Right. So at that point you have a whole different buyer psychology, a pattern interrupt on Meta, you've got to go get ads on Google, you've got to do your conversions and metrics and your paid traffic and your media and you got to go work with the GPT engines for SEO and a whole lot of other things that are extremely important when the time comes but they're usually very technical in nature and more difficult to get moving for everybody who's still trying to master one of the other sales channels. So I would say go platform by platform first, capture that demand you can do it to very large scales before you even go out and build a full-end website. You might have a site setting over there that's not doing anything but just proving you exist, right? Um, when you're not doing any active marketing on it, right? Because it's enough to run some of these channels to six, seven, eight figures on their own and focus on that before you open these additional channels and be very strategic about which ones you do. The value of it is the multiples. At the end it is the saleable asset of your business you're creating and the multiples can change very dramatically from three to five to 10x when you open up all these other channels.
SPEAKER_01:Got it got it and last thing here and then I want to move on to a couple other questions I have uh when you have that Shopify store are there any ways within the terms of service to drive traffic from your Amazon customers to your Shopify store.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah display on Amazon is part of their uh DSP services can drive traffic directly from Amazon on ads it is now appearing inside of Amazon to send products straight to Shopify.
SPEAKER_01:Got it got it and what's that can actually do that. It's Amazon's display side it's the DSP they used to have um we work at their disp uh DSP engine on and and uh a rep on one of our larger companies uh where we were talking about this the other day um being able to target and use Amazon system to send customers directly to Shopify got it got it that makes sense all right so data is a buzzword but very few sellers use it well what do you see at Cayman data and what are the critical data points top operators are using to make better decisions that average sellers completely ignore yeah so Voltage is really a holding company by which um I have supported the coaching and mentoring of a few folks who have become my operators that's reason the main reason why I even did that was I coached people into success with their business so they can help me operate mine, because I don't have any employees.
SPEAKER_03:I actually have one employee in one company at a warehouse in California have no other employees. And the effect of it is that K-In is this software engine that we built an intelligence engine is a long acronym that really has to do with data-driven intelligence decision on the discovery, the build and the optimize side of brands using um POE data from Amazon and our green light methodology to filter that data down to the most profitable, highest demand products at the highest profitable nature. So with that, it's all data-driven decisions based on Amazon's existing data, our methodologies and which product types and brands we should actually go after. It's helped us now identify the 1870 customer needs that run all of Amazon in there, what are the 6% of those needs that actually power the$700 billion in sales and has built me a pipeline around that intelligence engine that just defines green light on those top products, helps you see exactly which ones you should launch the Nike to the Reebok, okay, the our Ambrista brand against Breville, our Blizzy brand against the Ninja Creamy. It shows us exactly where to put product types and brands right into a tier two position and get the profitability and the green light required. And it is all data driven. It's been under an NDA for the last four years with all of my clients who were now releasing it at Cayman Data so that others can get involved at that discovery build optimize, you know, even scale and what we call our dominance side if they really want to go fast and hard to work on a more software driven green light methodology that backs into all of this intelligence and data driven analysis because you can use any kind of tool even this one if you don't understand what data you're looking at and how to read the data properly, you'll come up with a different conclusion. And so we combined that is a you know what we call our high voltage K-in data system so that you combine the knowledge with the data and you actually have a competitive advantage. It's very different. It's a product development platform engine really.
SPEAKER_01:Got it, got it. And I could tell you from experience you can be the best business operator but if you have a bad product idea or you're launching in a saturated market, none of that really matters.
SPEAKER_03:And so no you know and some of you listening to this understand that and maybe you've got a little bit lucky on a few products but how do you how do you replicate that? How do you make consistent growth? Have we been able to take brands to a million to five to ten to twenty and that is just repetition of data in process. They call it success is boring and really it's because I don't make decisions on what I think the market wants. I'm not smart enough to tell the market what it wants man. I'm smart enough now to have looked at the data built the data long enough built the intelligence engine and the workflow and then the data appears in the process and then we know what to do with it when we see it, right? Which is get that product out there, of course.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely absolutely so Amazon keeps tightening the screws on fees, on compliance, policy risk what does a defensible Amazon business actually look like now and how do sellers reduce platform risk without abandoning this channel?
SPEAKER_03:So the fees are going to be a natural part of that. I did a podcast a couple episodes ago on number 217 on the My High Voltage Business Wilder podcast where I actually broke this down in detail as to what it should look like for your cash on cash value, ROI of your product, inventory turn, how to look at the pricing and structure of Amazon differently in terms of the way you look at the value of your cash in motion and you guys might want to check that out because I go into pretty good detail there. But the end result is that you know the fees are going to be changing. That is going to be a naturalized part of it. How do I uh you know stay on the platform and receive its benefits while still being profitable and competitive. And one of the things we've done is spent a lot of time elevating our brands into what I call that tier two, tier three avatar on Amazon. There are three of them, okay? There's the primary tier one, which is where most 70% of all Amazon sellers went because all the tools took them there, all the courses took them there and they all ended up in that sub-50 dollar product range, fighting it out for a cost is at 30% and all this other nonsense. The rest of us, we have started there about 10 years ago and then elevated into tier two and tier three over the last five, six years, seven years. So now we are in tier two, tier three product types on all of our products we're even sunsetting products that are sub fifty that did great for a long time we're just shutting them down, right? So to pay with those fees, to overcome the fees, cost, cost of goods, landed cost, the business itself, infrastructure cost, health you know health or care, anything else we have to support the business itself and maintain that profitable Amazon channel as that customer demand capture platform that it is, it's to keep those$50 you know to$100 to$250 to$500 products elevating in tier two and tier three with our brand. And if you've noticed it is something that is a strategy that we deploy, but the market has come along with us. If you've noticed in the last three years, just as a natural indicator of where the market has gone, you can go look at the last three prime days, now prime weeks, and they're probably going to be prime months next year at the rate they're going, and look at the average order value for each of those prime days. It's a very good indicator as to what occurs in the fourth quarter. I'm just using it now as data to target how much inventory turn we should see and growth we should see for the fourth quarter. And the last three years of data have continually proven that there's an average order value rising. We have a obviously a economy in the United States where some inflation has been a challenge over the last three to five years, but most people don't see it or don't want to see how inflation has actually come down very dramatically. But what's occurred is people are still buying at this level, even though because inflation is going down, their average of order value are increasing. They're actually buying more because inflation is going down, gas prices are going down, other things that are incurring in the marketplace of our economies, you know, incoming tariff numbers and all this other stuff and all this money that's being plowed into our country is actually giving that average order value a higher and higher ratio. It was like$69 the last point. So if you have a$27 product you're not even hitting the majority of average order values on on Prime Day, which is$69. So if you're shooting for a$50 to$150 product, you're actually in within a tier two or tier three avatar that is the largest buying demographic on Amazon. I've said this for many years. Everyone kept focusing on the wrong majority product demographic, what they call the best seller simply because they were moving what they thought were the right amount of units, but there's a diminishing returns of scale in this and we have a a sheet we use right now it's not even a tool yet it's just a it's a it's a worksheet that we put together where we can literally see where diminishing returns on all of Amazon's fees and our price point for product launch matches a certain place where if we want to maximize profitability, we have to stay right in that slipstream. And some of you are are are within that it's a pricing matrix that basically says as my fees go up here on Amazon or my pricing goes up here with my product, where is that spot? Not where Amazon wants to put me but the spot where I make the most profitability per unit right? Where is that at? Most people don't even know how to recognize that they're they're gut reacting and feeling on price and change and fees and so they're arguing about the fees of Amazon, not realizing that yes, Amazon is going to make more money on the more products you move. So it's in my best interest to only move the maximum number of profit in number of products it maximize my profitability and therefore decrease any additional fees that Amazon might take from me. Right? So we're just being very smart in how we move each product instead of how many units of that product do I move a month if it's 10,000 this month I need to move to 15,000 next month and it's less about if I move 10,000 this month, I want to move 10,000 as profitably or more profitably next month. And I only want to raise that amount of units if it's profitable.
SPEAKER_01:Got it.
SPEAKER_03:Okay so people are focused on those wrong ones. They're not thinking in that portfolio of every product I launch has an opportunity to move X amount of units. They're thinking every product I launch has to move X amount of units or it's not successful. And that's the completely wrong thinking. It is every product I move in this system will move this amount of maximum units per year at this targeted profitability and then I'll launch another product and another product and another product to increase my amount of units moved for growth but and keeping a minimum or maximum profitability goal that I have. And that has to do with that pricing elasticity. So no the answer to your question is I don't care where Amazon's you know fees are going as long as I know where my profitability line has to be for the units that are moved on that product and then I'll just go launch more and more of those products.
SPEAKER_01:Got it that makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense for someone doing say like mid six to low seven figures on Amazon and feeling stuck what are the next level moves that actually unlock growth again without just spending more on ads?
SPEAKER_03:So I've got two case studies right now that are there one came out a little bit ago and one that's being worked on right now for somebody who fit that exact that question. And the same question came to me well, you know, it's always what are you doing differently that I don't hear everybody else doing and why why are you saying something different blah blah blah blah blah. The end result is that their their answer to their question was they were willing to listen and be coachable to do things they weren't doing before or needed to do and simply were not putting enough emphasis on. And those were what is my bottom line profitability? What are the numbers? How do I run this business at a macro business management level? And all of those folks are actually fighting at the micro level of business management still they some point in there they forgot to run the business and are still at the micro tweaking level and geeking level at the business and they have not elevated themselves into a business management or CEO operator position. They're still down in that CEO you know tactical level of micro changes to their business. Okay. And they think that's where the business needs to be impact. And at that point by the time they get to where you just said multi-six figures, they are at the macro management level the cash flow finances, inventory turns, time on water, how do I capitalize this business? How do I optimize my tacos types of conversations, but they're still down here taking you know groups calls on what growth hacks there are for this year. You know, how do I implement AI for certain things? They're looking at the micro operator level and that's where they're missing it. If they're looking at the business level then they would be looking at how do I increase my bottom line in profitability. And the answer for a management is I have to deploy more capital. How do I deploy more capital smartly to turn more inventory four times a year at greater profitability. We start asking macro business questions. We start asking strategic business questions and they're still down here at the detail level, right? They're not elevating that conversation they're not growing it. That is where the business turns from multi six to seven figures. And once you really understand that at seven figures and you get this David you can't get to multi seven figures or eight figures. You can't get to five million you can't get to 10 million or greater, unless that's the only conversation you're having.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:How do I deploy capital faster with more ROI turnovers in a year?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And when you do that, nothing else matters.
SPEAKER_03:Uh that's really what it gets down to because now you you're at the SOP level micro driven and you understand I have got to get that tier two, tier three product. I've got to get my profitability per unit up. I'll need to launch additional products, deploy more capital smartly, manage that capital churn if I need to or service that debt correctly from the business so I can get that next level. And what people are basically fighting is that risk to reward. They're fighting the pain of coming under a business growth situation that is required of them and they are looking at it going, well, I don't have the capital instead they're not instead of they're they should be saying well how do I get the capital? How do I solve that business problem? Not I can't solve the business problem. I got to start changing the language first.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Looking ahead two to three years, what do you believe will separate the winners from everyone else on Amazon? And what should smart operators start doing now to be on the right side of that divide?
SPEAKER_02:Get trained in business. Okay. Get trained in business first.
SPEAKER_03:You will not survive the next two years without it. Got it. AI is the rest of everything you just suggested. AI is becoming the rest of the economic engine behind us.
SPEAKER_01:I agree with that.
SPEAKER_03:I cannot if you want to be the AI operator, go be the AI operator. If you're trying to run an e-commerce company on multiple channels including Amazon, you have to start thinking about how I run this business with the use of those systems or not use of those systems to enhance and create productivities and time productivities as workflow productivities, but I need to be looking at how do I actually run this business very smartly? How do I manage my money correctly? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I I I think that's in in this dovetails really well into my my next question. You've mentioned the the voltage cohort, the, the, the coaching program that you have. Can you talk about that?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, in simple terms, thank you for asking. It's um it's related to what was our business builders, those who came along small group I've um trained about 300, 400 people since 2019 to do this very small amount. This cohort is really just kind of an evolution of the fact that I just don't have time to train and coach people anymore. So really what we're doing this year is the software is becoming part of the coaching model for those who want to get involved, the software and product development platform, it's not a research tool, it is a product development platform that builds the whole fundamental case for a product based on discovery, build and optimize it is all about the intelligence engine. So when I say managing the business, these things are being taken care of now. The product development platform does it for you. So what you have to do is understand how you're deploying the capital and how fast you can move it at what level. So the knowledge to understand that in the business training is what we do at the covort level now, which is a 12 week sprint to understand how to take a business or build a new business in 12 weeks with the end in mind, which is ultimately a high multiple exit, and get to your first 25 sales a day profitably, targeting the right systems and automations that allow that to occur so you move as quickly as possible into the business of the business and really understand what you should be doing there, knowing that so much is automated now. It really is. So much of the workflow is automated. And the cohorts are really the knowledge component of tying that knowledge together with the data in the system and finding the product very quickly because that's not hard. You do it in three steps now. It's Amazon's data so we prove the data is right. We use the methodology deploy and we use a product launch playbook to actually take it to market the correct way to train the engine the right way. And then we do that repeatedly with five products and we let the data tell us which products are going to scale and that's where we deploy good money after known data. We don't marry the rest of the products.
SPEAKER_01:So the cohorts are really about how to learn that process get that first product get your first 25 sales a day and then spend the next eight months with us blowing that up awesome awesome I love it I will post a link to that in the show notes and uh yeah get in touch with Neil and his team and I mean this sincerely one of the best Amazon operators I've ever had on the show. I definitely learn a lot every time that you're on on the podcast and really enjoy these conversations. Now Neil before we we wrap up we have something called the fire round. It's four questions we ask every guest at the end of the show. Are you ready?
SPEAKER_02:Okay, far away. All right what is your favorite book? Feel the fear and do it anyways by Susan Jeffries. Very good. What are your hobbies?
SPEAKER_03:I've been uh well my my family can my family be a hobby I actually love spending time with my family they homeschool here we enjoy them. Very quickly drone flying I finally got a one of the drones I wanted the DJI Avada 2 and I've been out here flying it around and I'm getting kind of addicted to it.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. That's awesome. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man one thing I do not miss about working for the man.
SPEAKER_03:In my world it was constantly traveling two to three times a week. Don't miss that. Yeah I agree being away from my family I don't miss like missing times. I don't like having to race to the DMV at the last minute to try I just don't like feeling that sense of constant stress and frustration that came with all that I fully agree with that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Uh what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those who give up fail or never get started?
SPEAKER_02:Summarize that all into one statement I would say perseverance in a word I like it.
SPEAKER_03:You will learn the right things in time. You can do the right things in time if you just keep going very literally just persevere. I'm 18 years at this and I'm still learning something every day.
SPEAKER_01:It's a great attitude to carry with you for sure. So Neil if people are interested in in getting in touch with you, seeing what you have going on at Cayman Data or enrolling in your cohort what's the best way to get in touch?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah Caymandata.com there's a free Pathfinder quiz IBM way over$2,500 in free stuff for those who just take the quiz to find out which direction they think they should be going. If the cohort is something that based on your answers you're eligible to take a look at there's 10 invites that are being handed out for the next cohort for those who are eligible you have to talk with me and we have to find out we're a good fit. I need to know your goals, aspirations, etc. If you're running an Amazon business, you could also qualify. But this is meant for both people who run and those who are really wanting to get going. We're going to work one on one for 12 weeks side by side through the entire process.
SPEAKER_01:Outstanding. Neil thank you so much for your time today. Thank you to our listeners we'll post links to all that in the show notes. And Neil looking forward to having you on the show again in the future.
SPEAKER_03:All right I'd be the three peat man hat trick. That's right. That's right. Thanks David
