All language subtitles for 4. 7 Failed Products in a Row! Lessons I Learned (8th did $6,000,000)

In this video we go over my product failures.
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This is a YouTube video that I made.
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So if you are not subscribed to my YouTube channel you should be.
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Click the link down there.
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But so it might sound a little YouTube-y.
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But I apologize for that but really pay attention because these are my first seven products that I failed
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and the lessons that I learned from them.
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So I hope that you guys avoid running into these failures and you have one failed product or 0 hopefully
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because we're laying it all out here.
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You should be able to validate demand.
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I knew no ways before I got started.
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I was just guessing and taking action.
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But hey the action got me here so...enjoy. The absolute most important thing on Amazon.
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Is your product selection going into the right market.
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So let's take a look at all of my failures so that you can see the lessons that I've learned of what
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does not work.
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And I'll go over a couple of that people have sent me that know where they've run into their own issues.
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But before we get to that I need to address some haters because people have been complaining lately
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so I got one claim someone calling me a scam artist saying that I did not hang out with Gary Vaynerchuk
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and I did not do six million in sales so all right here we'll put there's a screenshot of my sales.
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I've also done many interviews I've been on Manny Coates,
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Brian Burke, I've been on Startup Bros. I'll link that in the description. There is me talking and taking
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a selfie with Gary Vaynerchuk.
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I was on the Daily Vee 367.
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And there is also a video of me frolicking in a snowman suit in VaynerMedia office.
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So if that's not enough proof for you.
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Well I don't know what.
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What else do you want.
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All right.
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So let's get to it.
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And I'm going to show you guys the products that I have failed on and the lessons that I learned from
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them.
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Before we get to that video make sure you hit subscribe down there because I'm going to be releasing
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that video of me with Gary V at Vaynermedia.
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What I learned from the head of each department the digital landscape is changing so fast and I'm really
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excited to share that information with you guys and make sure you hit that bell because that tells you
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when I released the new videos my entire strategy has changed.
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I'm going to be more vulnerable and open.
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I'm going to be posting every other day or is that as much as I possibly can.
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And guess what I'm going to be giving it all away for free.
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You're not going to see me charge for information like a lot of people do.
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Gary told me to just just just be honest and give everything I have away for free so I'm going to do
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that.
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I know that the universe will pay me back some way in the future and if it doesn't well at least I get
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to help thousands of people.
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Here is the first product.
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It was LED strip lights.
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The first one that I ever tried.
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I got these waterproof ones.
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But what's different about these than the other ones these are individually programmable.
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Well what does that mean.
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Well it means that you need a microcontroller to power them.
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So something like this and you have to program them yourself.
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Well this was great for me and inventor but not many people who are inventors like me why did this product
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fail.
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Well if we take a look over here at Jungle Scout the sales are just really low.
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Look there's one guy who's doing 201 sales a month but the rest of that there's just barely
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trickling in.
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And so now those number one low sales. Number two I wasn't different guys.
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I did nothing new and that's what a lot of people when they start out they are just doing absolutely
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no means of differentiation.
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So when asked the question with all these other ones have reviews why would people buy yours over the
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other product.
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I didn't have an answer to that.
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And then this comes in at number three.
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I was competing against direct Chinese sellers so if they're going to beat me on price they have the
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same product as me and more reviews.
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Nobody's gonna buy my stuff.
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It's just basic common sense.
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So you always have to find a way to differentiate in that marketing pitch.
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I know I could.
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I'll make a video in the future about how I would go about and actually could make it in this market.
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But that's not for now we're just looking at what went wrong.
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So on to the next product.
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But I did not completely lose because check it out.
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Alexa trigger a white board rainbow.
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There are cool things that came from it.
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Product number two in my search the 80-20 coffee mug.
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A lot of entrepreneurs know about the 80-20 principle in a lot of them drink coffee.
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So logically I thought this would be a hit on Amazon.
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No I was completely wrong.
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Perhaps I now with my knowledge I could go make this successful on Facebook advertising targeting the
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right people.
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Perhaps the authors of the 80-20 books as well as Tim Ferriss movies and what not.
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Anyways let me tell you why this failed.
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Most people looking for coffee mugs or looking for something funny to give as a gift to somebody else.
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So I wasn't able to rank with that because I had my conversion rates.
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If you don't know what 80-20 principle is you're not going to buy this product.
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And then I wasn't able to rank for they were the keyword 80-20 because Amazon thought it was books and
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I was doing PPC and I just couldn't even get it to show me I could do some hacks to get it to rank for
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that keyword and we could see if I convert but there were conversion rate might be extremely low still
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because most people looking for 80-20 are looking for books and they're are just introduced to the rule.
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Also I wasn't able to rank for the keywords gifts for entrepreneur or entrepreneur gifts because people
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didn't know what the 80-20 principles yet again.
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So even though the lunch partner might like it 80-20 and whatever pastor had Amazon's based off stats
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didn't work.
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So what's the overall lesson learned from this?
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Don't make a new innovative niche product and try to launch it on Amazon.
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It's not going to work.
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Whatever you're launching on Amazon it has to make logical sense for that keyword.
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When people type in this keyword and they see your product.
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Yes.
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So for example let's say we were going to launch a new funny coffee mug.
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One of them that I've seen as successful is a poop coffee mug.
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They made a brand new mold and it's in the side.
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It looks like poop and coffee mug.
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That's successful because people are looking for funny coffee mugs.
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It's appealable to the masses so you're able to rank and convert on those keywords.
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So if you're going to be innovative on Amazon you have to be innovative within this square.
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If you want to be completely innovative and make niche products you've got to go to Shopify and Facebook
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and go on social to introduce them to a new concept that they will love.
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But you're not going to be introducing people to new concepts on Amazon unless it's through this keyword
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way that it's what they're looking for but it's brand new.
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So and they understand it.
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So take that into account and we'll see some other mistakes that I made and they took me awhile to learn
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this lesson.
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Oh.
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Another reason why this failed is I had a bad hand model.
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You need to get some sexy hands if you're going to use a hand model.
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All right.
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So here is the next one I was like this put the 80 20 but let's put it on a wrist band think smarter
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not harder.
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Yeah.
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So I launched this at about the same time.
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But same thing.
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OK.
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People were looking for motivational wristbands and gifts for entrepreneurs and everything but it just
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didn't match with that search volume.
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And people didn't know what it was.
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So it's the same D idea as the last coffee mug.
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But I was on to something more because there was margin.
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These wrist bands did kind of work.
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So I'll show you then what the next product is not going to go over the lessons because the same as
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the last one OK so I learned my lessons.
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You got to go where the search volume is.
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So I went into Serenity Prayer bracelets because I thought OK let's go into this because there
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is search volume for the words 'Serenity Prayer' and let me go in and make a bracelet for that because
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there are people buying bracelets.
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with Serenity payer and I can make something different
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So I did that and we would look at it here.
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If we pull up the Jungle Scout in the numbers they don't look very great here.
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OK.
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But when you pull up the Viral Launch market intelligence the numbers actually look quite a bit better.
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The numbers actually look better here because...
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Ok I see some monthly revenue here let's go over we need to look revenue last year that got eighty six
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thousand thirty.
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So there was some number here.
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But you know at the end of the day guys let me just be honest here was my product design wasn't very
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good.
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That was just the truth and it wasn't a good quality when I picked it up.
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It didn't make me smile and be excited it was more of a "All right".
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It's got to be a homerun for it to work in my opinion.
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So this did not work.
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Another failure.
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So I said "Screw it".
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This is failure number four.
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But I did not give up.
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I kept going guys stick with it because you're going to see how this progression of my lesson learning
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when failure failure failure failure seven failures to six million dollars because I never gave up and
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I learned lessons all along the way.
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So now on to the next one... Whoa man, these are crazy glasses.
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Yeah.
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So this was my next failure.
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And these glasses were... the Jungle Scout when I ran the web app.
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It looked like it was gonna be a killer.
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It was saying it was selling roughly two thousand per month.
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So it was just gonna be a killer.
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I got a good a pretty good price on them for about four bucks and they're selling for thirty dollars.
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But it turns out there were all the sales were going to one main person.
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OK.
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And that was a brand.
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It was selling just based off of the brand and the brand name that they had made so...
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And Jungle Scout was wrong.
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It said it was selling two thousand a month.
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It was actually only selling about maybe one hundred.
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And then the rest of the competitors maybe once or twice a week.
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So they just there wasn't the volume that it promised to sell.
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And so now I literally have hundreds of these in my house.
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So if anybody wants some, leave a comment. I'll send you all of them that you want. Also send out wristbands,
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all sorts of other stuff.
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All right.
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So what lessons did I learn from this?
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Well number one, you've got to check out Jungle Scout and make sure that the products are evenly distributed
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sales because if it's all focused on one brand, then it's gonna be hard to steal those.
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They might be driving external traffic or might just be a pure brand buy and you can't compete with
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them.
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And I also learned that you need to check and make sure that jungle Scout actually right. Do the 999 trick,
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check out Viral Launch - their tool is better at predicting sales than jungle Scout is because
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it said it was doing two thousand a month.
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It was not at all.
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So it ended up just being a giant mess.
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I had no way...
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So I actually did do something right here by customizing and getting these metal frames because the
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rest of them were plastic.
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So this is unique and everything.
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But guess what?
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You've also got to make sure not only is your product different but is it good?
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Is it good quality?
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So people are using this for raves and parties and you want to know one problem? When people are jumping
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up and down...
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It'd be nice if the classes stayed on their head.
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The competitors stayed on their head.
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These don't.
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So now I'm just stuck with these hippie Kaleidoscope glasses and they're great.
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But you also can't walk with them on.
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It's very disorientating.
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And the competitors you could walk with them on.
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So that's where I failed.
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But I also I'll show you the other ones that I failed too. But I was getting closer with these.
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So how do you solve the problem of these falling off of your head?
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Well you get goggles.
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So we got these goggles going now.
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And so these were actually worked a lot better.
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And I was pretty proud of the quality of these but I had no form of differentiation yet again.
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The Chinese came in and I'll show you that on the computer. Checking out right here you can see some
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of these are even down in the seven dollars after fees.
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There's just no money to be made here.
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But they just drove the price down.
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I could not compete on price alone.
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I had no form of differentiation.
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So yet again I'm going to lose.
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That's that's what it comes down to.
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Whoa, alright! Now we've differentiated.
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That's right.
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We're the only ones out there with the furry ones.
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Guys we've got this. But there is one problem.
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There's going to be people wearing these and they're gonna be dancing.
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They're going to be all hot and stuff and put it on and off and then...
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Oh no.
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The fur the fur! It just falls off.
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It gets in your mouth.
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It gets in your nose.
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Chicks ain't gonna deal with that.
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It's all over the camera now.
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So like we've said you gotta have you gotta find the where there's these search volume so there was
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with the kaleidoscope search term. Kaleidoscope goggles or rave goggles and stuff.
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So I could rank for that.
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It looked cool and everything but did not get good reviews because this fur is falling off all the time.
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This product was yet another failure.
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But I saw this long path of failures.
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I had sick four different glasses that failed, these failed my wristbands failed, my coffee mug failed
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my lights failed. You know just feeling about ready to give up.
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But there was a prevailing that came from this all. So I've had all of these failures but I've learned
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a lot of lessons along the way.
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You need to find something with high search volume you need to find somewhere where you can innovate
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and make something new and unique.
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But within a small square so you have to innovate within what people want.
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OK great.
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Now you have to make sure that you have the best product and you need to have that uniqueness, that
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competitive edge so that you can price higher than the others and not just get into a price war.
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So there's a lot of factors that need to go into account here.
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But I finally got one scenario that laid out: the solar eclipse for 2017.
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Took all those lessons that I learned and now was OK.
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I'm going to source the best glasses to make a whole new product.
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I'm going to innovate and make a new eclipse viewer that nobody's ever done before.
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I'm going to completely take over the whole market in every aspect and kill it and I'm going to make
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another video on that because I learned so many lessons from that.
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But here is what came from it.
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I found lenses that were safe to view the eclipse with and I put them into these product that I had
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from the past.
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So all of my failures culminated and I did hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in these and
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I'm so proud of it because it just shows that if you keep pushing and trying and learning from your
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mistakes and you never give up you will achieve.
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And I did and these are the exact glasses that I wore for the eclipse and it was best one of
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the top experiences in my life.
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I realized that we didn't get to why I see a lot of other people failing so I'm going to make a different
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video about that in the future.
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And I've got a great video that's taken me a lot of time but it explains my entire journey as an entrepreneur
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and of the solar eclipse and going on from here out.
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So make sure that you're subscribed to the channel there and then hit that bell so you're notified of the
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new content.
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We're going to be releasing a lot more.
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And could you please comment below and let me know what failures you've had as an entrepreneur or with
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products on Amazon.
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I think by sharing the failures and the perseverance that we all go through, more people will be encouraged
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to start or to continue to go because everybody's always posting about their what went awesome and not
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many people are posting about their failures and it's kind of like the news is always talking about
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negativity and never about the positivity.
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This is like the opposite wherever you talk about the positive but come on there's lessons learned from
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all of these failures.
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So please share and below. I comment and respond to everything.
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So I look forward to hearing that and seeing you guys next time.