COMPLETE Guide to Print on Demand for 2025 (21+ Hours) transcript

welcome to the free Ecom course what you have just found is over 21 plus hours put together by my wife myself and our amazing team to bring to you everything that you could ever possibly need to start and grow your own successful e-commerce business so what's in this course is everything that I learned from growing eight different Shopify Brands to seven figures and Beyond but the best part is that this course is not just based off of things that used to work and S plus years of experience also based on the things that are working today like this brand here that we launched a couple of months ago back in July and since then it's been on track to do well over a million dollar in its first 12 months the reason we're making this course is that after I look back over the past decade or so of experience and just counted up all the mistakes that I've had along the way I realized that there's just no resource out there like this that is truly based off of real Real World experience and what is currently working and certainly nothing like that for free cuz not only do we have the in-depth lessons where I go through everything with you step by step not just showing it for an example actually building one that we're going to launch and grow to six and seven figures in sales but we also give you all the resources and PDF downloads and templates that you need so that you can copy paste everything that we do in our business while I certainly can't promise any kind of results and anybody who tries to promise results you should take a closer look at them what I can promise you is that this 21 hours is by far the best work that I've ever done my entire life and it leaves absolutely no stone unturned so if you are a complete beginner and you're confused and not sure like what direction to follow in or where to get started this resource is for you or if you've already started taking sales you're struggling to get profitable and to scale then this is going to show you how to do that we covered everything from zero to seven figures that includes all of the marketing all your product research your site optimization customer service how to manage your finances all of the little ins and outs we've covered all of that and putting together an amazing resource like this is obviously not cheap or a fast thing to do so my team and I and my wife/ business partner we have worked on this recording for well over a month invested well over $30,000 in editing and bringing together all of the resources here before you and making it completely free now a question you're probably asking yourself is that okay if it's so great then why is it free so that seem a little strange and the reason for me deciding to make this free and available to everyone comes back to a personal experience I had that when I was first starting out I decided to buy a course I invested about $5,000 of money that I didn't have just racked it up on my credit card and by the time I actually got into the course and started working on the business I didn't have any money left over to actually spend on the business and I was just in a really bad spot ended up having to take a job in order to pay down the the course alone I don't want that experience for anybody and if there was a resource out there like this it would have completely changed the trajectory of my life I'm really happy with where things have ended up but that would have completely changed the trajectory and I would have been really grateful to whoever did that so in this course it's broken down into 10 different modules for you in module one you're going to be learning the intro lay of the land exactly what this course is what you can expect and how to get the most out of it then module two you're going to be laying your foundations learning how to become the kind of person that is capable of not just starting a project like this but actually seeing it through all the way to the end module three you're going to be learning how to do market research and choose your Niche and then building a brand that will stand out in a really competitive space module 4 is product and fulfillment where you're going to be seeing how we do product research and then how we use AI tools to create create and design all of our products extremely cost effectively and then how we use print IFI so that they print pack and ship all the orders right to the customer without us ever having to touch a thing in in module 5 you're going to learn how to create a high converting Shopify store where I'm going to be going through with you step by step Click by click sharing my screen with you as I'm building my own brand along with you again this is not just a me teaching stuff at you I'm literally building a new brand alongside you module 6 is the beefiest section of the the entire course and that's where you're going to be learning how to drive profitable Facebook and Google ad traffic in module 7 you're going to learn how to set up all of your email flows and automations so that you can just set these up one time and then they run for you for the duration of your brand and just R in extra profitable sales for you every day of the week module 8 is systems and operations where you're going to be learning how to not just maximize your profit but how to make sure you are actually keeping it how to run your financials how to scale your team so that you can work on the business instead of in it module 9 is scaling where we're going to be talking about how to go from $10 to $100,000 per month in sales the module 10 is where you're going to be learning about what it takes to build an exit from a seven figure e-commerce business so those are all the things we're going to be covering as I mentioned it's extremely robust it's as comprehensive as it gets it's just a matter of you deciding is this something that you're going to stick through all the way to the end knowing that this is the last resource you will ever need so if you're ready to jump in and change your life there's just two quick things we ask you number one is if you're interested in getting full access to all the free resources then consider joining the school Community again it's completely free it's an amazing community of people that are going through the course with you that you can talk with ask questions bounce ideas off each other whatever you want in addition to getting all of the resources in a nicely formatted step by step and then the second thing is of course using the affiliate links down below of the businesses and softwares that we recommend by using those links you help us recoup some of our costs and earn a small commission that it doesn't cost you a single thing but certainly don't feel pressured to do it by any means you can always just go Google it and find the same software but by using the links Down Below in some cases there's special offers that we've partnered with these companies to be able to bring you such as Shopify which is the one that I recommend signing up for right now which by clicking the Shopify link you get three months of a Shopify trial for just a dollar then the second link is printify which by using the link down below you can get 1 month of printify Premium completely for free while you try it out and this is the company that we have used for years and years to fulfill all of our products we absolutely love them and we're going to be talking a lot more about them I appreciate you even watching this far in the video just that alone shows that you stand out from the rest of the crowd and I believe in you that you have what it takes to get this done we are here for you in the school community and in the comments every step of the way now let's scale [Music] all right so we just want to take a quick minute to first of all introduce ourselves uh and more importantly explain like some of the background behind the course and why we're doing it so you know exactly what you're getting into who are we all right so we are wait okay so if you haven't seen my YouTube channel or Chris's YouTube channel um we are married we are husband and wife and we are we are we're married it's crazy but we've been business partners and roommates and stuff for going on a couple of years and we've decided to make this course after running these businesses long enough and like with consistent enough results that we felt like sharing it to hopefully help some other people get results along the same lines as what we my quick 30 second elevator pitch is that I quit my 9 to5 job at Amazon it was more like a 9900 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. job at Amazon but anyway about 8 years ago holy crap yeah 8 years ago and then I lived in a e-commerce incubator with 12 other entrepreneurs for about four years or as Meg called it the Ecom frat house either one is pretty accurate and during that time I learned a ton and in the past seven eight years I built eight different Shopify Brands to seven figures and exited from five of those Brands and a couple of them were with my business partner here and then as a fun fact here's the notepad that I had from when I started learning about starting a business right after have you seen this before no after I graduated the so the terrible handwriting aside the part that I thought was funny was that like my questions at the top were LLC question mark and then I thought that the most important thing was immediately researching trademarks and patents I actually did a really in-depth course on patent research which have never used to this day and here's my actual college gpa for my transcript so I graduated with a whopping 2.88 my mom always thought that I was going to be a doctor and instead I've sold a lot of t-shirts and the reason I'm showing this is just to share that you know I'm clearly nothing special and at the end of the day if I'm able to get these kind of results then I I think just about anybody can as well and from the the house that I lived in here's an example of here were our sales from way back in 2019 we were like split up into different teams and it's a story for a whole another day but anyway it was it's pretty cool experience and that's where I learned a lot we held events that sort of thing where people would come in and learn from us about running Facebook ads and email marketing Shopify how to find winning products all that sort of thing and now who am I my name is Meg and I actually had no no I don't know if I want to say desire but like I absolutely never thought that I would be pursuing anything e-commerce related I actually went to school to become a pediatric nurse um and I still do that per DM to this day but after I met Chris he introduced me to e-commerce specifically print on demand and I think this is something that you know you could get into and do really well in and so during Co when the world was shut down I had a lot lot of free time on my hands and so I started my first shop and the rest has really been history since then it went did a full flip nursing was my full-time and now e-commerce is my full-time so a very different route than what Chris took yeah and to prop Meg up for a second she went from her first ad campaign that she ever launched it was literally named quote I have no idea what I'm doing normally I name the campaigns like cold purchase optimize she showed me her ad account and it was like a full sentence I have no idea what's going on so she went from that point to during Co being a nurse like working her ass off obviously and just stayed very consistent with it and through all the ups and downs that we're going to talk about a lot throughout this course all the challenges that come with not just running a business but like being an entrepreneur in general and like the mental ups and downs you have that everybody faces Meg's like face that while balancing being a nurse and she stuck with it for what could it was like four been five years yeah four or five years so nurse she's an amazing Testament like you can 100% have a career path that you'll always saw as your like you know your long-term solution or your long-term career and if you're like open to new and challenging things and you can be like Dynamic and just stick with it she's a perfect example of how like you can go anywhere you just set your mind to it basically so so why can we talk about this basically because we've done it and we are only going to talk about things in this course that have worked from our own personal experience for running multiple seven figure e-commerce Brands and we have a combined 10 years of experience currently we work about 4 to 8 hours a weekish on the brands each but that completely varies we'll talk about that later and we consistently make six figures profit from our stores and we've also more importantly we've helped quote unquote normal people or think we're normal people build seven fig stores so it's not just from our case studies or examples it's from friends and family and people that follow us that we've helped them go from zero I have no idea what I'm doing to seven figures in sales and we're not trying to teach anything outside of just what's worked from our own personal experience and it's from running like in my case eight different brands grow growing them from zero to seven figures all different niches lots of different products we're just sharing from our own personal experience we're not branching outside of that you'll never hear us like a brainstorm about what could work it's always just from our own experience so you can take it as this has definitely worked for somebody and it is what it is why we wanted to make this course we one find it really fulfilling we've noticed between both of our YouTube channels that there's a lot of questions out there when it comes to e-commerce print on demand and people just I guess more videos out there that that just skim the surface they don't go deep into how to do things within the business and we saw this as an area that we can completely help and change people we can do the Deep dive we can show you exactly how to do every single step of getting a store from nothing to launching and even scaling beyond that and it's fun for us to work together it is fun for us to work together and we like being able to help people that we care about achieve freedom from the 9 to-5 Lifestyle and like Meg said there's a lack of good information out there or if it is quote unquote good it's very surface level we want to get down into the weed show the good the bad the ugly and really act like if somebody was sitting next to us somebody that we cared about if they were sitting next to us and we were going to show them step by step everything that they needed to know to build their own brand like what would that look like and then obviously in full transparency it's completely free wherever you're watching it and so the only way that we're making money off of this is from like the partnership links that are placed throughout this course we appreciate it if you use it if for whatever reason you say screw Chris and Meg you can obviously always just go Google and find the sites but we appreciate you guys using it yeah you absolutely don't need to click the links if you don't feel comfortable with doing it again it doesn't cost you more by clicking on any of those links it just gives us a little Kickback for basically like referring somebody to the brands that we know trust and use yeah and it allows us to keep making like really in-depth free content like this yeah and another reason that we're making this course this was I used to play Ice Hockey so this metaphor hits home for me but the reason we're doing is that a lot of the content out there if you ever seen the movie Miracle it's an ice hockey movie about the USA uh gold medal team that when they were making the movie The Producers had two options when they were trying to find people to to play the roles they could either a hire actors and teach them how to play hockey or B they could find hockey players and teach them how to be actors and ultimately they ended up going with the ladder they ended up hiring hockey players because they knew like the majority of the scenes they were trying to shoot were on the rank and they found that it was easier to teach them to act than it was to take actors who had never actually done it and put them on skates for the first time I think they actually tried that and it was like a laughable experience and the reason I want to bring it to people's awareness that a lot of the content out there on starting e-commerce businesses or just businesses in general it's done by actors who are pretending to be hockey players what which is like somebody who gets really good at YouTube or making content and like they know the right retention hack stuff and they know how to make a video go viral and they know how to make the right thumbnails and then they get they like learn enough about how to play hockey how to do e-commerce and that's how they're like they're passing and those are the people that that goes Super viral because they're actors they know how to do the content production side and we wanted to be basically the hockey players who have actually been there done that we have seasons under our belt we know the game of hockey in depth like the In-N-Outs and if you think about it like if you wanted to learn how to play hockey would you go to an actor that was hired to play a hockey player who might look good they might know how to say the right things but they don't act it's very surface level learn from an NHL player who's higher life like obviously the latter so I just wanted to point that out to people that they or help people understand cuz I definitely got duped by it a lot early on in my career when I was learning from people that know how to make really good videos but they don't actually know what they're talking about or practice what they preach or they have done it but haven't done it in years and we can attest to things have changed over the last four years especially since Co so a lot of things out there I feel are like 20 20 2021 pretty much you could throw up any store and like they launched in 2020 and since then a lot of people I feel have not had the same success that they had in 2020 and have chucked their hands up and just say it's not the same or I did it in 2020 and now you can do the same thing in 2024 yeah the market has changed things have changed but one thing that hasn't changed is Chris and I have never stopped running a brand like we've always consistently had a store and the current store that we do run we we've had for 2 and a half almost 3 years now so it's proven that the sales can continue to come in that stores can continue to do it just takes a different type of approach there's a lot of people out there that just aren't walking the walk or doing what they're teaching and so that's why our unique promise to you guys is that we have experience you can trust with over 10 years of running these Brands combined uh then complete transparency we're going to be completely open we're not going to ever oversell this for more than it is or or less than the effort that it'll take so we actually want people to get Real Results we don't want people to just take the first step and then give up as soon as it gets hard we want like real case studies and then we're going to guide you through each phase of this this process making sure you understand the how the why and where each step fits into the 10,000 foot view which is part of the re big reason why this is such a long course is that it's not just showing like which buttons to click it's showing like where this fits in conceptually making sure you understand it and that you're actually taking everything that we learned from 10 years combined and like learning that in as fast the time as [Music] possible so the first group of people that can get value out of this are the Caged employees AKA The People the boat that I was in and the point of this course is to show you a route like out of that current trajectory that you're on and and hopefully a path to Freedom the next are the kind preneurs the people who know that they want to be entrepreneurs but just haven't found like the right vehicle to commit themselves to and they have they suffer from shiny object syndrome where they start things but then don't really finish it through the point of this course is to show you what that vehicle can be for you that we're proof that it works and it's just a matter of sticking to it and applying what we teach here and then the next are the struggling e-commerce sellers so the people who are already selling already have an online brand but are just struggling to take sales get profitable or just establish any kind of solid brand foundation and really scaling to a point that they're able to do it as a full-time source of income and then the last group is the aware students so these are upand cominging students who are objectively aware of the fact that the modern education system is extremely dated and won't really provide them the kind of information or future that they really want to be prepared for not to say we both went to college so we're not saying definitely don't go to college or anything like that but there's definitely a group of students that are aware that there's better options out there and by going through this course zero cost to you zero like investment or risk of any kind it's why we're making it free so there's nothing but upside in becoming aware of what the other options are out there some rules for this course is this is not a get rich quick type of scheme it's not do nothing but click a button and make money you do have to put time and effort and you actually have to follow the things that are being taught it's not just going to happen automatically on its own and this is not for people who are only out there for themselves and want to make profit without helping others or providing any value yeah and next our results are not the typical or the norm like if you take a sample size of 100 people that say they started a Shopify brand like the vast majority of them end up failing now the point of this course is to help mitigate that as much as possible but in my anecdotal opinion I think the big reason that the majority of people end up failing is that as soon as the going gets tough they quit and that's the point of this slide is that this will be tough this course by no means is going to make this just a walk in the park and it's going to be something that you're going going to have days where it's extremely challenging and you're going to have hurdles to overcome and by even despite the length and depth of this course despite our best efforts to brain dump everything we know there's still a lot in here that is missing so they're going to be times that it's extremely challenging you don't know what to do and you'll have to think on your feet and figure it out for yourself so this is not just follow module 1 2 3 4 5 and make a ton of money it's not like that anybody and honestly anybody who ever tells tells you that their course or whatever is like that is just lying to you be willing to bet you paid a lot of money to get into that course cuz that's all that course creator is really selling yeah is optimizing trying to selling the results but on the same point Chris and I have also had stores that have failed failed in we look at it as like it may have failed like monetarily but it never failed to teach us something else to put into the next Niche that we were trying or the next brand that we were going to launch so even though it may not monetarily work out you learn so much from that one store that you can then put into your next store or your next brand just because one didn't work doesn't mean that the next won't so a warning is that we don't recommend anybody again picturing you as a friend or family member somebody that we care about sitting next to us we would not advise that person to jump into this if they're living paycheck to paycheck instead I would say get a job get consistent income and then set aside 10 to 15% of your income as your quote unquote business fund and then watch this training in your 2 to 3 hours after work each night we've heard similar stuff to this but like I have 30 days until I'm completely out of money I need these ads to work now that's just if you are in that kind of position please do not go in into this course like you sure learn the course watch it it's free obviously but don't count on this business to claw you out of your out of debt because there's such a steep learning curve with this business and with any type of business at the very least you have Financial stability and then you're looking for ways to Branch out like you need to have a baseline where you're not worried about putting food on the table and like you need your ads to optimize in order to eat your next meal like that's just not a good spot to be in and it can be done with just doing a few hours after work like when I launched my first store I was still working fulltime as a nurse I was doing night shift coming home answering customer service emails waking up answering some more customer service emails on my day off I was putting up new designs so it can be done it doesn't have to be I quit my 9 to-5 job you absolutely can do this part-time learn the strategies and eventually like break free from that 9o5 job and building off of that so how much time can you expect for this to take in the beginning so I would say as a a baseline like bare minimum I would invest 10 to 12 hours per week and our goal is getting to the point where you can put in four to 6 hours per week just to to maintain your current sales that's pretty much what Meg and I do with our other brands so the way that I would roughly think about allocating this time is about 4 to 6 hours as a beginner should be dedicated to learning learning then your product is about 2 to 4 hours your marketing 1 to 2 hours Shopify around an hour or two and then email another 1 to two hours and these are very rough estimates but just to give like a high level framework so you know like how to think about like where you should be allocating your time and again this is bare minimum when I was living in the house I was doing like 40 to 60 hour weeks doing nothing but e-commerce now I was not like heads down like the most disciplined person by any means yeah me's laughing but like we were constantly talking about business and coming up with new strategies and split tests and like brainstorming and like we were just living in that world like quite literally to the point that like we were learning at such an accelerated rate and as a beginner that's the biggest thing you're trying to get over use the Hermos term is to pay down your ignorance debt which that's what you have in the beginning Meg and I are now in a point where we can spend 4 to 6 hours a week on a store that'll make 20 to 30 grand profit like very consistently per month but the only reason we're able to do that is because we spent so much time learning it we can look at the business and like just like getting good at anything there's a Tipping Point where you've achieved Mastery and in the beginning you're trying to get to that as quickly as possible so how much money do you need in order to start an e-commerce brand probably $11,000 starting off will get you where you need to be for example Shopify runs a special where you can pay a dollar for a trial for the first three months so as you're learning playing around with Shopify it's only costing you $1 I think everybody could afford that um the next would be mid Journey or idiogram other AI tools that you can use to create your own designs rather than having to hire a designer that's around $30 per month and honestly the biggest chunk is going to go towards your Facebook testing budget roughly $500 to $1,000 total the more money that you put into the ads the more results that you're going to get to give you concrete answers of which ads are going to perform better than the others yeah it just accelerates the testing phase and obvious this is one of the questions we get by far the most how much budget do you need for your ads it's by far the biggest expense in starting this business but we're going to talk about this a lot in the course how it's just one source of traffic and we use Facebook ads because that's what we know it's extremely effective I've been doing it for years and it still works well and can for other people especially as ads have gotten better but there's other options out there for example Tik Tok is huge now we honestly haven't done a ton of like Tik Tok organic content but we know that people are crushing it with that like they will order their product they look at what types of videos are doing they take their own video and post it now they might have to post like a 100 videos before one they get good at it but two they have one that goes semi viral and then they might get a couple of sales reason we like going that the paid ads budg way is because you can test with a low budget and then quickly scale and you don't have to be sitting there with your phone like shooting Tik toks and stuff I just you don't really have to be too creative either from what we've learned yeah like you just have to have a really solid mockup like we don't do anything crazy in our ads but all that to say there's other options out there to besides throwing 1,000 bucks at ads so when people ask how much money do I need to get started they think about the ads in the marketing the wrong way it's not just you're putting money into the ads and you're just lighting it on fire the goal is like money plus really good products plus time plus like effort and hard work like you learning how it all works literally turns it into a money printing machine but it takes the extra two pieces in there it takes the time and it takes the effort on the part of the person who's running the ads it's not just follow the course and then printing money it takes those extra two variables that a lot of people skip over and we're building a machine that can turn $1 into three really imagine that if you had a machine that every time you take a dollar out of your wallet and put it in you get $3 out the other side would you ever ask somebody what budget should I put into the machine no you'd be like going to your bank like pulling out every dollar possible and figuring out the other question much more fun question which is how much money can I put into it and that's the point that we work towards getting so what you need to get started is honestly not a whole lot you need a laptop internet connection an LLC which is optional we'll talk about that later and you need a business bank account again that's optional but the biggest things are the dedication and the commitment to write out the tough days and you also need a Shopify and printify accounts so Shopify is our website builder where we're going to be doing everything we have a really in-depth tutorial for you where we walk through Click by click explaining all the strategies all the setup linking our products and the product fulfillment we use from printify which is our print on demand supplier we've worked with all of these print on demand suppliers gelato printful local print shops printify time again we come back to PRI because they are by far the best in our opinions and for Speed uh like delivery speed production quality cost it checks all the Box here's the affiliate link to sign up for printify and create your free account by using that link you get a free month of printify Premium which gets you like discount up to 20% off yeah off of your cost of goods cost of goods yeah and for anybody who's wondering how much money are you making off the affiliate program if we weren't genuine about using printify just look at this in order of like how much commission you make for referring customers gelato is number one printful number two printify is a distant third so we were just trying to make money off this we would be just promoting gelato but we're saying gelato stinks printful is way too expensive and printify is the best we we get by far the least from that and we don't want to ever try to sell people on things that we a don't use and B that we don't trust everything that you see in this course our apps that we use our suppliers that we use we are completely transparent about that all right and then as you're going through this course if you're watching on YouTube We highly recommend joining our free school group because we broken down each of the lesson modules into individual sections with all the resources mentioned in that video directly underneath it like all the transcripts all that nice kind of stuff um and you can track like your course completion along with there's an awesome community of people in there who are also doing the same exact thing so you can guys can bounce ideas off each other and it's a really good support network as you're getting started I wish I had this kind of group when I was starting out and then we're also introducing for more Hands-On one toone type of support we're introducing a paid Group which is called wcale University so what you get when you join we scale University is private one to1 access from Mega myself so if you post a question in there we're going to do our very best to get back to you as quickly as possible we also have weekly live Q&A coaching calls which this is where you can join the call post any any questions you have any of like your homework assignments if you're not sure about it ask it in there and you'll get live feedback from us along with hearing all the questions that everybody else who's on the coaching call is dealing with that and we'll do polls to see what areas people are struggling with most and then we can create like a good slideshow or pull up our business that we run and Coach people through troubleshooting challenges that they're currently having running their brand then there's a VIP community of passionate peers because everybody is paying to be in the group you know that everybody's extremely serious like I was in a group called entrepreneurs organization EO where was 8 Grand a year or so and part of the reason that it was so valuable was not even like the materials and like lessons like that stuff was good but the biggest value was from knowing that everybody who was a member of it was Allin that they were like fully vetted they were legit they were business owners and they were people that were willing to invest in their own success and that alone made it amazing knowing that you didn't have to like if you're meeting somebody new like vet like is this somebody that I can actually trust or learn anything from everybody there was a players and that's the same thing that we're building with we scale University next is we're going to be rolling out an accountability partner program so one of the biggest challenges when you're starting out is just staying consistent and one of the best ways that we found to stay consistent is having an accountability partner who holds you to what you say you're going to do and I feel like we all need that from time to time time there's always days where you don't feel like doing what you should be and getting partnered up with somebody who's at the same point as you and wants to go to the same place is extremely valuable so you guys can hold each other to it yep and also just get through those hard days like even now after Chris and I have had Brands we still have days that we're like wow this is really hard and it's a lot easier to get through those days when one person is maybe not having an easy day and the other person can lift you up and say you know what this is just a minor setback we're going to get through this let's problem solve whatever issue that we're facing and get through it and that's what the accountability Pro partner program I think is going to be amazing for it's just offering that support on those days where you don't know what to do you're having a hard time there is no blueprint for running a business so being able to talk to other people going through the exact same thing that you're going through I think is really helpful and next is the seven figure brand case study so throughout the course we're building a brand new brand completely from scratch and you're going to see it go from like absolutely nothing to Shopify store buildout marketing all the products Niche selection brand name Logo email marketing literally everything top to bottom customer service you name it and then in wcale University we're actually going to be launching and running that brand so a lot of courses would just show you how to build it and then that's it we think that's pretty use less you need to see that it's actually something that can be successful before you want to model it so that's why in we scale University every day for like the first 30 to 60 days at least we're going to be recording a very candid video showing here are the ad results we had from yesterday here's what we're thinking about here's how we're going to optimize it and here's our p&l like literally showing everything so you can follow along and problem solv with the same things that you're dealing with in your business along with us and watch us go from zero to get the profitability to scaling to six figures and Beyond yeah we're going to show you that 10,000 ft view that Chris was talking about it's hard to imagine it at this point but we're going to basically be giving you that view and showing you this is why we set things up the way that we did because it can be run profitably you can scale um and we're just going to show you that day to just get a better understanding and help uh launch that growth and paying off that ignorance debt as fast as possible and last but not least we want everybody who's in we skill University to be fully committed and wants to be there so if for any reason you're not happy with you know being in there or financial situations change and you can't afford the the investment then there's a 30-day guarantee like no questions asked uh and you can count on that because this is our personal brand attached to this and you only get one of those and big part of the reason that we're doing this is that in the free group you get a lot of people that are just joining to spam people like this guy Donald Duck here joins spams people and we don't want that kind of we want much like really high caliber people on these coaching calls asking really valuable questions that everybody can learn from because everybody's going to be investing the most valuable resource which is their time and again back to the the value of the the community being the peers that you're going to be joining it's to get winners and less Donald's we scale University you can join it now for $97 a month again full 30-day money back guarantee there's already a bunch of people in there we've been having great conversations and we'd love to see you in there as well so you can join it by going to school.com we scale now at this point I want you to stop and before we dive into the next section of this course really ask yourself if you are ready to like fully commit yourself to this if you are ready to like quote unquote burn the boats make a final decision that you are going to see this through all the way to the end cuz it's so easy in our day-to-day lives to just hear idea and go oh that sounds good and while we have some motivation we like go into it half-heartedly and then as soon as things get tough as soon as our mood changes we go oh that was stupid and then we just go back to exactly what we were doing and we don't want that to be you we want people to be able to go through this and actually see lasting change build something of real value for themselves that they can be proud of that provides Financial stability for them and their families and in order to do that in my humble opinion it requires burning the boats which basically means making a point of no return type of decision that you are going to make this work that you were storming the beaches and then to give yourself no option to turn back you are lighting the boats on fire so your only option is to go forward really evaluate that for yourself before progressing into this cuz if that's not you totally fine we recommend just not even getting started we recommend go watch the surface level YouTube videos but if you are really committed and you really want to see this through to the end and go with with us on this journey then we're happy to have [Music] you before diving into things here's an overview of everything that we're going to be covering in the course starting off with what our main goal is like what's the objective at the end of the day that we're working towards we're basically trying to build a brand that brings happiness to our customers and and we're doing this based off of the ways that I've built eight different brands to seven figures and that all stems from having happy customers at the end of the day you're not able to scale to seven figures plus with people that are pissed off and not enjoying the products and it's just a much more fun and fulfilling brand or business to be working on so happiness for our customers is our goal as for sales we're shooting for getting to 100K per month in revenue and this goal is completely subjective to you and your personal situation there's a lot of people watching this who are it would be life-changing to have an extra $1,000 per month profit which that's totally fine we're going to show you like how you can do that but we're also going to be setting the foundation for as you get more familiar with this if your goal is to grow much larger than that you're going to have that option available to you but don't think that for any reason that just because we say it's such a lofty sounding gold that it's going to be like oh this is too much for me this course is designed to go step by step from soups To Nuts everything like doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner we explain everything from the ground up so that we're not talking over anybody's head it's designed to be as applicable for everybody regardless of your background experience or any of that and once it's up and running once we're past the initial learning curve we're going to be working towards getting to the point that like Meg and I are at with our brand which is we put in four to maybe eight hours per week on it if that we could put in a lot more if we really wanted to grow it Beyond this point but right now this is the point that we're at generating consistently 20K Plus in profit with a minimum or maximum of 4 to8 hours per week required and it's also a quote unquote Lifestyle brand that we can run from anywhere in the world with laptop and Wi-Fi and while I don't really believe in the concept of passive in in come cuz like I've said this is going to take a lot of work but once you get it past that certain point of needing to put in all that upfront work it does become relatively passive especially once you start hiring out to vas to manage the processes that you don't want to be doing it can get pretty pretty passive so you can be running it from a laptop on a beach somewhere if that's your goal or if your goal is to grow it to eight figures then we're going to show you the path to doing that as well and along that same line we're also going to be building an asset that is sellable meaning it's not dependent on us and it's not Drop Shipping where it's just hit or miss months it's slow and steady consistent growth that makes it into something that would be desirable for a potential acquir to come in and buy you up and this is Robert kiyosaki's cash flow quadrant from Rich Dad Poor Dad and a lot of people start off an employee and then when they start their business they think that they become a business owner but really they become self-employed and our goal through this whole course is to elevate ourselves from the point of being just self-employed doing everything ourselves in the day-to-day to a true business owner where we have systems that work for us instead of us working for them and here's a great quote from Tony Robbins about building a business that is sellable and he says without an exit strategy all you have is a job an expensive job a job with a lot of responsibility and risk the true purpose of a business is to build a system that can make money when you're you're not there and sell for multiple and when he says multiple he means a multiple of your trailing 12 profit in the case of an e-commerce business like some business types like software for example sell for multiple Revenue but for us if we build a e-commerce business that did $100,000 in trailing 12month profit then we could expect to sell that for a multiple of it ranges greatly but anywhere from 2 to 4X so instead of having to run that business for four more years you can have a exit or liquidity event where you make two to four years of cash flow up front and then you have all that cash to do whatever you want with it Go invest it start another business whatever you want so in the course in module one it's the introduction getting the overview laying the groundwork then in module two is where we talk about our foundations and the foundations are back to me saying I'm treating this as if I had somebody that I really cared about friend or member whoever sitting next to me and they wanted to start a business what would I teach them in order to be actually successful and not just start this but actually be able to see it through to the very end and the foundations are everything that I've learned for my entrepreneurial Journey all the ups and downs how to optimize yourself as the person who is going to be able to see this project through to the end because we don't want to waste anybody's time especially yours and if you're not you know the kind of person who has energy has Focus has laid those foundations to actually be able to stick with this then it's all for nothing and module three is where we are going to talk about research and branding so I'm going to be screen sharing along with you looking at market research showing you how I look at like competitors companies finding a winning Niche and then coming up with our own brand like our brand name our logo like our whole brand identity that is what's going to be customer facing and is going to really differentiate us from the competition but it all starts with picking really profitable Niche and one that we know has potential for us to grow into and we're not going to cap out Grand a month like a super small Market we're going to pick winning niches that have huge upside potential module four is product and fulfillment this is where we're going to be showing again how we do all our product research so we find winning like Design Concepts different ways that we can make those designs like using different AI tools all the different prompt hacks you could ever want and then fulfillment is where we're talking about we use printify as our main fulfillment provider to print pack and ship all of our products to our customers so that we never have to really touch a thing and how we can optimize that fulfillment process to maximize our margins the module 5 is all about Shopify and we split this one up into two sections so there's the stepbystep setup where I'm going to be showing you like literally Click by click screen sharing how to set up the same kind of template that I used on all eight of the previous Brands exactly how to set that up to get us to a baseline by Baseline I mean a high converting store that has a good average order value that checks all the minimum requirements for a good Shopify store and just that alone will get you like Head and Shoulders above the competition it's way better than like the free themes out there and like the beginner stores they're just missing a lot of the main pieces so that's why we're going to go Click by click so if you've never used Shopify before this will show you everything you need and then the second section is more the strategy of Shopify and the reason this is important is that as after you launch your store as you're troubleshooting and trying to optimize overall your sales your conversion rate we have specific lessons in there for how to optimize your conversion rate if your conversion rate's low how to optimize your average order value your site speed so that those are lessons that speak at like more of a general level talking about like how to Think Through conversion rate what influences it how to boost your average order value and it gives a much more conceptual understanding of like why it converts the way that it does so Step One is the Click by click just down in the weeds how to set it up what buttons to to press then part two is explaining the why behind everything so you can really like in start to intuitively understand like why we're doing what we're doing and module 6 is all about traffic we're going to go really deep into Facebook ads Google and other traffic sources as well but very similar to the Shopify setup it's going to be Click by click showing the main campaigns that we launch and how you can do it very easily like without having to spend a ton of time on creative and audience split testing and all that stuff I'm going to show you my exact campaign layout show you setting it up Click by click and then we're also going to talk about like the higher level strategy so you can start to again conceptualize and understand like where this fits into the bigger puzzle and for once and for all feel like you actually understand Facebook ads and marketing cuz I know how daunting it can be as especially starting out the module 7 is going to be email marketing which this is where uh mostly from Meg she's going to be walking you through all the email flows and automations we set up again Click by click while explaining like the why and the how behind everything and this is one of the best sections and one of the most requested sections primarily because it's just once you set it up it's like pure Profit just about on the back end and this is the module that really differentiates like what we're building like an actual sustainable brand from the rest of the e-commerce trainings out there where they just teach you how to find like Hot Products make some viral posts and then it burns bright but then burns out this is building a consistent flow of returning customers so that anywhere from 15 to 25% of our revenue is always coming from customers who love our brand and then we're just getting back in front of them automatically reminding them of new products and getting them to come back to the store in module eight is systems and operations this is where we're going to pull back the curtain and show everything behind the scenes like the down in the weed stuff that nobody really ever talks about CU it's not sexy but it's so necessary to get your store uh or your brand to be like profitable to begin with number one like how to run your financials properly how to manage your customer service how to manage your supply chain but then it's also important for being able to eventually Elevate yourself out of the brand and how do you not have your time consumed with you know the day-to-day tasks like uploading products ads all that kind of stuff and we give you all the templates and Sops that we use internally so you can just copy and paste them into your own business module 9 is scaling once we're at the point of being able to consistently put in $1 and get $3 to $4 back from our business how do we put a million dollar into the business and get3 to4 million back and we're going to share all the best strategies that we have for doing that and module 10 is if you are somebody who's interested in building a brand by following these modules that is able to be sold and exit for for a lot of us like a pretty life-changing amount of money someday then this is going to show you all the things you need to be aware of and what the process looks like how do you prepare the business to sell what's the right time to sell how to find buyers how to negotiate with them how to close like the ins and outs like what to expect and common mistakes and even if you don't want to sell the business or that seems like a pipe dream like way down the road like Chris I just want to get started and make something it's still a good thing to understand because building a business that is like sellable also just means like running like a clean operation it means having good financials it means like having good systems in place means just having something that's sustainable and that's what all this is about so whether if you decide to sell or not it's going to be a great module for everybody and along with obviously the brand that we're going to be building together there's some amazing skills that you're going to be picking up along the way way that it it took me years of running this before I really picked my head up and realized like holy crap you really do learn so much by doing this kind of brand far more than doing just a social media agency or just doing like an Etsy shop I really believe that because what we're going to be doing is Niche research branding product development paid marketing organic marketing conversion rate optimization Supply Chain management finances and cash flow management like so many different things that like different skill sets like you're going to be basically like a one siiz fits-all type of solution so that once you sell your brand or whatever you end up doing with it down the road you can take this skill set and apply it to whatever new opportunity whether that's everything from starting another company to doing High ticket Consulting to getting a really high paying job at a company that would kill to have somebody with this skill set the world is literally your oyster once you build these skills like you're going to be learning just by following along in these modules and if this was a college course say I don't know Penn State like where I went the niche Niche research would be called a class like marketing 5 519 which was $3600 branding would be marketing $497 which was also $3600 as one credit is about 1,200 bucks uh at Penn State or similar at other colleges and each of these are three credit classes product development like designing all your own products making your mockups that would be something like graphic design 102 which that's 3600 bucks paid marketing would be marketing 401 another 3600 organic marketing is marketing 473 conversion rate optimization is IST 250 Supply Chain management is scm2 200 and finance and cash flow management is accounting to 11 all of that added up would have costed $28,000 which sounds absolutely insane to see that number up there but it's actually true that's just like how bizarre the uh I don't know college like system is and I mean I paid this I paid a lot more than that that's just some of the classes and out of everything I learned at Penn State I use pretty much none of it in running the business today if I was to go and get a job today which I never would do I would rather live in a cardboard box than ever get a job but if I were to do that then I would not talk about my Penn State degree my college degree at all it wouldn't even be in the discussion it would be all about what I've learned and how I ran my own business and scaled it to seven figures doing exactly what is laid out in this course so there's a quick rundown of what we're going to be covering and what you can expect from this course along with the main goal or outcome that we're shooting for and all the skills and extra bits you're going to pick up along the way [Music] now we're going to get an understanding of how this business model works from a 10,000 foot view so that once and for all we can fully understand all components of the business understand where we are and what we're building towards along with how this business compares to other business models out there what the pros and cons are from a completely objective point of view we're going to talk about uh Drop Shipping 3pls print on demand obviously and where all this kind of fits in and then we can see a lot of advantages of print on demand and how the company can grow over time and what the options are and to start off with that let's look at this diagram here for a quick 10,000 ft view so at a very basic level the way that print on demand works is if a customer places an order for one shirt we then receive the funds from that customer customer $26.99 is our typical pricing and we normally charge around $5 for shipping so that comes out to $31.98 minus some transaction fees and we've gotten a lot of questions about how the cash flow works the good thing is that the cash flow is one of the big advantages that you get all the money up front before we even have to fill the product so those funds from that sale hit our bank account that we connect to the store within 2 to three business days so it's really quick and then in the meantime we turn around we place the order with a print provider so we're just on our laptop we don't have any of the physical printers oursel place the order with a print provider such as printify and they charge us less than what we charge the customer it's just how business Works obviously so we get charged about 8 bucks plus $4.75 for shipping which comes out to$ 12275 that leaves us with about 18 bucks in profit now this is a very simplistic example we're going to talk about optimizing our average order value and how to maximize our profit margins later on but just know now from a uh cash flow and just overall model this is how it works customer places the order we get the funds we then turn around and place that order with printify and printify ships it to the customer pretty simple to give a visual representation of how this works it's we drive traffic to our Shopify store that has our products that we're going to be making using tools like mid Journey Dolly Mystic and idiogram so we get our traffic primarily from from meta Tik tok's another option and clavio for email marketing then anytime an order is placed it gets fulfilled by printify and then for customer service we use email software such as gorgeous or you can just use Gmail we're going to talk more about that but this is the basic structure to give you a 10,000 ft view we drive traffic from meta to our Shopify store which is our Standalone website people buy get shipped to them by printify and we make the money in between that's the basic structure of it so now let's learn how our business model stack what that looks like so our Market our product our fulfillment our store and our traffic so business model General overview first question we have and this is for any business not just print on demand these principles or these elements apply to any model so our Market is just simply who are we selling to the product is what are we selling them fulfillment is how are we going to fulfill the product for them how are they going to receive it the storefront or website is just where can people buy from us and then traffic is how are we going to let people find out about us now Market is what people call your Niche or Niche either one and some example niches are business owners or professionals you could segment based on their familial status if they're married if they have kids you can do professional segments it's great spelling Chris you can do gender-based markets age-based demographics income based segments and interest based segments lifestyle segments and interest segments would be another one so an important question that we get asked a lot is why pick a niche why not just sell good products just in general and the reason we pick a niche is because it provides predictable and dependable Revenue as it's already been battle tested by other companies and if you target everyone then your target is actually nobody and this is a common mistake that I see with a lot of beginners and especially drop shipping stores they just add every product every trendy thing that they can get their hands on throw it up on the site and there's a certain Tipping Point of just adding bestseller or random products your site where it just starts to look like a Chinese gift shop and it just looks like generic crap doesn't look like anything trustworthy or it just looks like somebody who's trying to make a money grab compared to a brand that is built around a specific Niche or interest to a targeted group of people and the entire product line is around that topic like yoga for example imagine a store where you come to it and it has some yoga shirts but then it's mixed in with like nature and Outdoors and like random stuff so that's why we target a specific need because there's more than enough people in the niches we're going to be talking about that you can make a seven and eight figure business just selling to them specifically so we'd much rather carve out a very targeted chunk than try to speak to nobody in the greater population and it makes your marketing more powerful and our products more meaningful it's much easier to get customers when we know exactly who we're trying to talk to and it's impossible to have a brand that is the best in the world at multiple things but it's shockingly easy to be known broadly for just one specific thing and that's what we're after CU like I said there's 8.1 billion people in the world 8.1 billion potential customers so let's pick a niche that has 1% of that and it's still a pretty massive group the product so what are we selling to them so the possible options are we can do Services which is like an agency uh like social media marketing if you do somebody's ads for them you do digital product which is like courses softwares subscriptions so charging people in order to have access to something and we can do physical products which is obviously what we're talking about in this course so that's apparel Electronics HomeGoods Etc and here's an example from Amazon of just some of the many categories that a person could Target so Consumer Electronics Home and Garden Health and Beauty toys and games food and beverage and apparel which is what we're going to be talking about here so why apparel why should we sell apparel products compared to I don't know Electronics or Furniture first reason is that it's very customizable it's viral which this is something that we can do with print on demand that we can't do with Drop Shipping and that is huge thing that builds brand equity and that is differentiation we are able to create our own unique products that people can't find anywhere else using print on demand compared to drop shippers they're all just selling the same crap from Alibaba and as soon as one drop shipper finds remember those fidget Spinners they were all exactly the same so yes the first people that got in made some money but over the long term once other drop Shi ERS see that you're selling a fidget spinner and there's nothing to differentiate you they just rip you off sell the exact same thing and they start selling it for cheaper than you to undercut you and it becomes commoditized and it's a race to the bottom and then soon the market is flooded and then what do you know I I can't tell you how many people I talk to that were stuck with warehouses filled with fidget spinners for that exact reason they got commoditized and they got blown out of the market next thing is that everyone wears them on a daily basis I don't know about you guys but I for one wear a shirt every day meaning that there's repeat purchase potential because they also wear out and next thing is that they're extremely giftable like a funny t-shirt makes an awesome gift for stocking stuffers birthdays all kinds of stuff which means that people will be buying it for more than just thems it's also extremely scalable because print on demand we're going to be talking about how we work with massive printers that have insane capacity that can scale up to whatever size our businesses compared to a lot of other models the supply chain becomes a massive headache I'll tell you more about that from personal experience and one of the most important things especially when we're starting out is that it's extremely easy to Pivot meaning that if we are testing out a niche and find that it's not working for whatever reason or people aren't liking our designs we're able to just say okay I'm going to go make more designs in that Niche instead and no harm no foul you didn't invest in a bunch of inventory you didn't hire a bunch of employees to fulfill your service you didn't invest in building any kind of expensive software and it's very easy to Pivot and quickly test a bunch of different things without investing hardly any capital and even when it does stink invested time into this Niche you still learned a ton and those learnings compound across the different stores like I learned far more from my failure stores than the ones that have scaled to seven figures and Beyond and it's also a really good weight for shipping which that's something that can't be overstated enough the the logistics behind e-commerce are tremendously difficult when you get into larger products especially when you are working with a third party Logistics where you open your own Warehouse we we don't want any of that we're trying to build something that is sustainable can meld into our lifestyle and be scalable for us and not consume Our Lives essentially next thing is that the global print on demand Market is booming and expected to Boom for the next decade or so however long they're forecasting it out like looking at this chart it's growing by 27.8% year-over-year and it's forecasted to be a$ 43 billion Doll Market by 2032 now these are it's talking about like softwares like printify and stuff but those are byproducts of the demand for print on demand products so point being people are buying t-shirts and at the end of the day there needs to be demand for the products that we're selling no matter what business you're in and print on demand is one that like for all the reasons we just talked about it's a growing Trend and it's going to continue to be that way so when people say like print on demand is dead or it's saturated no yeah there might be more people selling because AI has made it more accessible but the demand is growing just as fast if not even f faster and we're going to talk about this later but the real demand and the real winners out there are going to be the ones that are doing what we're doing and that's building Brands not just Hawkin t-shirts on Amazon and Redbubble for cash flow we're going to be building a real brand with recognizable image that we can send emails to our customers and they'll buy from us whether it's on Shopify or any platform building a real following here's another chart showing the print on demand market and the important piece to note is that there are a lot of other products outside of just apparel that have massive demand home decor drink wear are two other big ones within this course we're going to be focusing specifically on the apparel because it's the best product category to get started in but we'll also talk about the expansion opportunities for later on down the line number three is fulfillment so how are we going to be fulfilling the product so a couple of different options there's sell fulfillment so this would be if we as the seller personally stored packed and shipped all the products directly to the customer so picture if we bought a bunch of t-shirts in advance thre them in our garage then as an order comes in we go out to the garage and ship it to the customer that's one option not going to do that you could order inventory Plus work with a third party logistics company so what that looks like is we would find a supplier in China or wherever negotiate with them to order like t-shirts and bulk ship it to the US print on it and then ship it to a third party Logistics Center which is basically just a warehouse it's just a warehouse that you contract your fulfillment Al to and then when an order comes in from your Shopify store the warehouse would pick it off the shelf and ship it to them we could drop ship which is where the seller takes the order but the product is then shipped directly to the customer which print on demand is like a subset of Drop Shipping but a lot better in my opinion eliminating the need for the seller to hold the inventory and then lastly there's print on demand which is like Drop Shipping except the product is printed when the order comes in now how 3pl works just again this is just to give a frame of reference so that when you hear about Amazon FBA and like different business model you have a mental model or understanding of where these things fit in which for me as I've learned it's been absolutely crucial in my success is learning what else is out there so I know what to do and what not to do and why I'm working on what I am so how 3pl works is basically like I already said you ship the goods to the warehouse the warehouse receives the product they store it and manage the your inventory then they pick and pack your products when an order comes in and they ship it to the customers and and the warehouse will handle all returns couple of examples of three PL companies their part of logistics are shipmonk shipbob and Amazon FBA I've personally worked with all of these actually chipmunk is based out of Florida I used to work at Amazon so these are all options they're pretty similar so how the Drop Shipping model works is like pretty reductive but when a customer places an order that order is automatically sent to the retailer or the manufacturer and they then either have the the goods pre-manufactured or they will make it on demand and then they will ship it to your customer and that's pretty much it but we'll talk about the downsides in a second but some examples of drop shipping companies are autod DS overow and AliExpress probably heard of all of these they all basically do a combination of the same things they just go out to a bunch of different warehouses or manufacturers in China and get a catalog of their products and list them on their site they basically just build an integration between the warehouse or all the this catalog of products and your Shopify store when your order comes in goes to your Shopify store goes through their app they then route it to the right manufacturer pass the information and then they just charge you like a subscription or a percentage it's basically how they all Operate Now how print on demand works is a customer places an order say the example we used before $26.99 or let's just use their example 30 uh then they forward the order to the print on man printer so like we use printify and the printer within them is Monster Digital so order comes in they print on the T-shirt and then they ship it out to the customer we make the profit in between the key difference again is that it's our own artwork it's not just some generic cataloged product it's actually something that's unique that people will only be able to find and buy from us this is just an example of what a print on demand facility can look like to give you a frame and reference like on the Le hand side here image those are the massive printers that they use that are able to just crank through t-shirts you can buy like the home like heat press ones one shirt at a time it's much worse quality with these the print actually feels like it's part of the shirt rather than just that crinkly crap that sits on top going through companies like these their machines make it feel like something really high quality and they'll just have uh a bunch of Blanks on the Shelf like the example at the bottom when your order comes in they go grab whatever color T-shirt it is throw it on the printer their printer electronically already has your images stored and prints it on the T-shirt they then take it off the printer throw it in a a poly mailer like a little bag slap a shipping label on it and it goes out the door to USPS FedEx or whatever shipping provider they work with a couple examples of print on demand companies are printify printful and Jato these are the big three by far the most well-known brands in print on demand and we're using printify I've worked with all three of these and printify has been by far the best experience we'll talk more about that in a second but onto our store so where can people buy from us we have brick and mortar which would be if we open up a store front like a t-shirt shop we have marketplaces which are like Etsy Amazon Redbubble Etc then we have Standalone stores which is Magento woo Commerce woo Commerce is a subset of Wordpress and then we have Shopify and Shopify is the one we're going to be going with for a ton of reasons but it's just know that it's by far the best it's price is comparable to all the others and no doubt like you can remove this decision point in your mind go with Shopify don't even bother I've used all the other ones don't even bother going with them Shopify converts far better and it's just much more userfriendly it has so many more apps built on the platform specifically for e-commerce sellers but again it's our own Standalone store so it's not like we're owned by the marketplaces like Amazon Etsy Redbubble we're building our own brand following and and asset which we're about to talk about marketplaces versus storefront so Shopify versus Amazon Etsy and Redbubble what's the difference and an easy metaphor to understand this is that being in a Marketplace is if you open a popup shop in a mall so the Mall already has all of its own traffic its own customers you basically pay rent to be in the mall but you get the benefit of there's already people there they've already got shelves set up for you you basically just go in throw up your own products on the shelves and start making some sales the downsides like we talk about our there's a lot of them but just to finish off the metaphor our Shopify store if we opened up a standalone shop on our own we're not building it up out of the ground because Shopify gives us a lot of tools to get started but it is our own Standalone website like in order to buy from a Marketplace store Front you would go to amazon.com back/ whatever your storefront name is to buy from a Shopify store you just go to your brand name.com that which is a massive difference so that's why we build the storefront the marketplaces to summarize it are good for cash flow but you're not really building an asset because you can get kicked off at any point Shopify is building an actual asset because you are the boss they won't kick you off they'll kick you off if you do something illegal but again it's not about Shopify it's about the fact that it's a standalone website so if you do something messed up you have to really screw up to get kicked off of Shopify I know some people got kicked off like during Co and stuff but even if you do you just go rebuild your exact store under woocomerce or Magento or something else yet which yes it'll be crappier but the experience of the customer you still maintain everything like you're not really losing anything to the customer it looks exactly the same whereas if you get kicked off of a red bubble or Amazon you have nothing you are at Square zero and you have no business anymore so the pros like I said is built-in traffic it's easy to set up and it's low risk relatively uh but it's also low reward the cons are that it's much higher competition like when people go to Amazon they are not just shopping for your products they are comparing your products very actively to everybody else on the market there's a lot higher fees like transaction fees and just like listing fees and then you also this is the biggest one you don't get any of the customer data because if Amazon gave you like an email just imagine this if every time you bought from Amazon you got added to a new business's email list think about how bad of an experience that would be and Amazon doesn't want that they're in the business of keeping the customer happy not keeping the seller happy necessarily so you're not getting any of the customer data compared to on Shopify we're building our email list which is a massive asset that we can then use however we want we can use for follow-ups for cross sales for promotions for holiday sales sales and every sale that we make from that is 60% profit margin and that's why I'm really excited for that section of this course cuz it's going to make people like a really good passive income if you set up the flows that we show to you but anyway the cons you can be kicked off at any point and again can't iterate this enough you are not building an asset You're Building cash flow and we'll talk about how you can use Etsy and these channels to augment your brand but the real thing that we're going to be building is a brand that people recognize and they fall in love with the brand like yoga stay was an actual brand like people came to know the name we started selling on Etsy down the road and our sales went pretty well out of the gate because people already knew who we were but again we want to be building an asset something that'll stand the test of time the pros for Standalone stores we have brand control we get the customer data there's no fees aside from transaction fees and we're building an actual asset that we can actually sell and exit from down the road the cons though are that obviously you have to drive your own traffic there's no built-in mall traffic and you have operational responsibility of everything the puck stops with you when you're selling on your own store compared to on a Marketplace there's a lot of bumpers up for you like there's a lot more to manage if you don't know where to look and like where to focus your time which is exactly why we're doing this course so that you can be pointed in the right direction and have your checklist of what your time should be spent on and you don't get stuck in the shiny object syndrome of holy crap there's so many apps that I could be using I just want to use them all I've been there we want to avoid that that's why we use Shopify so next is traffic and our traffic is basically how are people going to be finding out about us so options for this would be Billboards tv ads radio ads influencers and Facebook ads word of mouth and email marketing and Google ads so those are the the bottom four the ones that we're going to be prioritizing Billboards tv ads radio ads those are just throwaway examples give something concrete that we're all familiar with we're not going to be doing any of those because the bottom four are far more effective so here's our business model stack overview so we talked about the market that we're going to be choosing a niche because we want to be speaking to one group of people and that's true for any business not just print on demand it's true for software agencies Drop Shipping every business it's better to start off Niche and expand from there next we talk about what our product is going to be we talked about the different products you can sell you can sell Services software agency memberships Consulting info products and then there's physical products then within physical products there's apparel as one of the categories and I didn't quite touch on this but with a lot of the other categories there's a lot of problems that go into it like Electronics there's a ton of rules and regulations around how you can import it how you like labeling children's products that was actually one of the first businesses I tried to start right out of college I tried jumping into selling a slam dunk product children's toys thought I found like a great Gap in an Amazon market then quickly got blown away by the amount of red tape and legal hoopsy if to jump through so there's a lot of problem with other categories apparel is one of the best for all the reasons we talked about then we're going to be fulfilling using print on demand compared to 3pl or drop shipping and we're going to be using printify specifically then we talked about our storefront like how people are going to be able to buy from us talk about the differences between marketplaces versus standal in stores why we're going to be using Shopify and then as for our traffic we're going to be using Facebook ads email Google We'll add like Tik Tok at some point but Facebook has been very consistent for us over the past it don't get me wrong it's frustrating sometimes but it's amazing traffic source so altogether hopefully this has helped paint a picture of what the business model is how it's going to operate and just want to show one last example which is to finally put to bed the confusion around how the marketplace model works is like the difference between marketplaces versus selling on Shopify and why we do Shopify it's like we talked about we drive Facebook ads to our own store make our products fill it with printify and there's all this back and stuff whereas if you sell on Etsy your traffic comes from Etsy your email marketing is done through Etsy your store is on Etsy fulfill with pry still cuz Etsy doesn't do fulfillment and then your customer service is done through Etsy so can you see if you notice the problem where this is your business that you invested a year of your life into and then Etsy gets mad at you for some reason and they decide to kick you off or ban your account then this goes away and this goes away what are you left with you're left with a printify account with a bunch of of products uploaded into it that nobody can buy from that kind of sucks merch by Amazon is similar with the exception of they also do your fulfillment so now if Amazon gets mad at you that goes away and that goes away yeah and the reason that this isn't buying an asset is imagine you're a potential business buyer who's looking to invest in a business that you could see growing for the next 5 years the first thing a potential acquirer evaluates is what's the level of risk to this business are they Diversified or is there some kind of of scenario that could completely tank my potential asset and if if you were in their shoes and you're familiar with e-commerce would you look at somebody who's selling on just Etsy that they're waiting for the shoe to drop and Etsy kick them off would you go look at that business and say yeah I'm fine with that massive risk that 100% of the business could be gone overnight or would you look at this business where it's Diversified across platforms and even if say Shopify gets mad at you you still have the rest of your business standing and you can just them plug in woocommerce or any of the other sites but again Shopify getting kicking anybody off is extremely rare 1% of the time compared to Etsy and Amazon and then last thing we'll cover in this lesson is the flywheel this is an important concept to understand CU this is how we are really going to build the business and get past the onetoone like effort in one reward out from the business operator standpoint and that is what can we get compounding for us in the business and that really comes down to Word of Mouth and like a quality customer experience the way that we start that flywheel is a new customer makes a first purchase we then deliver an amazing product and experience which we'll talk about all the different ways we can do that long story short just run a good ethical business and be kind to your customers and that good stuff will happen over a long enough period reinvest The Profit into making more designs that's a big mistake that a lot of people make is they put up 20 or 30 designs get a couple sales and they try to take all the money out you want to reinvest that to get this flywheel really going viewing it as taking $1 out now is the equivalent to taking out $11,000 later next we have our email and SMS retargeting ads to follow up with people build that customer relationship build more sales get them to come back into the flywheel get a repeat purchase deliver another amazing experience and get Word of Mouth get them telling their friends and word of mouth is really the only type of marketing that can truly compound everything else is just like linear you can scale up ads you can scale up your email marketing but word of mouth is the one way that you get one person who tells two friends those two friends tell two friends it's exponential so this is what working towards and at the end of the day as you're doing this flywheel which by the way you can't do this part or that part on Etsy or Amazon you you have no control over that you can't even like really control a lot of this and people aren't and this is another important point is that on Etsy and Amazon people aren't necessarily buying from you because of your brand they're buying from you just because of the product compared to when people are navigating specifically to your Brand store they're buying from you because of who you are that's where real like brand equity and value comes from is when people are buying from you because of what who you are what you stand for and that they like your company and not just oh this is a neat shirt that's the point we're trying to get past and that's the perception a lot of people have I think about print on demand is that you're just selling like neat t-shirts we're in this course what we're doing different we're really trying to build a brand we just so happen to fulfill the we just so happen to sell t-shirts because of all the reasons we talked about and then we just so happen to fulfill those t-shirts with print on demand because it's requires no Capital to get started it's very easy to Pivot no inventory it ships directly to the customer and allows us to focus on the most important stuff in the business we're building a real brand we just so happen to sell t-shirts and we just so happen to fill with print on demand as the business grows those two things can change but keep that focus in mind that we're building a real brand we're not just a t-shirt store so that's the business model that's what we're working towards hopefully this has helped give a 10,000 foot view of the different business models and ways that you could build your own so that's the 10,000 ft view of this business model hopefully this has helped give a perspective as to the other models out there like Drop Shipping and stuff like that so now when you hear about those things you can just put your blinders on completely ignore them know that yes there is opportunity there like there is with lots of stuff but this opportunity that we're focusing on is the one that's worth your time and more importantly worth your time for an extended period that was the objective of this lesson I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one [Music] in this lesson we're going to be looking at some case studies and results that we can expect with this kind of business model and specifically we're going to be looking at my case study from my brand called yoga stay which started a couple years ago and ran it for almost 2 years exactly scaled it to just over $3 million in sales and then sold it to a company called open store but we're going to be looking at this case study to see not just what these businesses can do in the beginning but what the growth and like the 2 to threee plan for them can look like and the options you have down the road like how you can evolve it pivot it whatever you want to do just to give us a frame of reference and here's some of the other screenshots and examples of stores that I've done this model with and again that's just print on demand and then once you get past a certain threshold you can start selling any kinds of other products so just always keep in mind that print onom man is just the Fulfillment model that we use and it's not like the actual business itself so yeah here's yoga stay like I said we scaled it to $3.6 million in sales 125,000 customer contacts and we founded it in February of 2020 and then sold it in February of 2022 so the sales and metrics just showing you this as a frame of reference in general our conversion rates that we see nowadays are in like the 2 to 2 and 1 half% range we just get cheaper traffic but yoga had really strong first couple of months but we had a 3.1% conversion rate $55 average order value and the sales there that like backs out discounts and refunds and stuff that's why it's different than the 3.6 number couple of things that we ran into with yoga stay just to give you an idea of some of the major decisions you'll have to make along the way is like I said we had strong first couple of months and then in January of 2021 I'll talk about this one first we had to switch our print provider away from print to somebody else because prfi was having a lot of outages due to covid related like stock issues so we ended up having to make the decision to switch to a print provider that had the ability to not just do print on demand but also co-ack products which I'm going to talk more about that in a second how we were able to start offering like yoga mats and stuff like that but in December of 2020 we had a bunch of covid related outages and after switching we were able to turn sales back on so that was pretty challenging something I never had to deal with you shouldn't have that problem much anymore gilden's not really running out of stock these days but it's part of the history of yoga stay uh we even filed the yoga trademark and here are some of our top sellers and you can go look this store up yoga st.co and see all these products but a key point to take away from this is that the top four or five products here made up a large percentage of the overall sales like we had hundreds of products and as you can see these five products made up like a pretty good chunk of that and the lesson to take away is that it's really important that we keep testing lots of products until we find these winners cuz it can completely change a store like overnight having winners versus not and you never know which design is going to be that winner like any of these I wouldn't have said would be a best seller like I certainly wouldn't have thought that the yinyang bonsai tree t-shirt would have sold $100,000 worth that's just how it goes and also this is back when we were only charging like $1 19 to $20 for a shirt now we're charging anywhere from 26 to2 9 depending on the size and this is just more a couple more slides from our pitch deck when we were going to sell it we had 485 products we had 22 different styles of yoga mats 23 styles of different yoga pants and again number two and three the mats and pants we only started offering those once we were placing orders from suppliers in China to uh have our own like product line and not just do print on demand that's an example how you can expand it over time uh we had 2600 Plus customer reviews it was a really fun brand because you're getting like tons of feedback from customers and they're all loving it that you can build like a really cool Community around it and that's why I recommend that if you're starting out with one of these Brands choose something that you're also passionate about like my business partner and I on this brand love doing yoga and so for us this was like pretty cool and it was right up our alley so we like we've been in and around like yogis so like we know like what they like what they talk about types of language like their demeanor like little intricacies that you wouldn't be aware of unless you were like part of that demographic like for example like the hunting Niche I know nothing about it so it wouldn't be a good Niche for me to go after because I don't know like what they find funny I don't know like the terminology and slang terms and like how they interact I don't know any of that stuff there somebody there's millions of hunters out there be could be a great Niche for somebody who's been doing that their entire life and second thing I'll say about the customer reviews is that this is the goal happy customers equals a happy thriving brand and that was something that we were fortunate to figure out early on in yoga day was that really at the end of the day boils down to how happy is your customer and not about your bottom line like when we were first starting out I focused on profit first customer later now I realized that number one it's a lot more fun and rewarding focusing on the customer first but two you end up making a lot more profit when you switch your focus and as you're going to be seeing later on in this course the store that we set up was Bare Bones extremely simple and it doesn't have to be a complicated store I won't break the point now cuz we're going to dive into this in detail later but it was a very simple store we had about 50 products when we first launch this was I got this picture from way back machine that's why some of them are missing but yeah it's extremely simple it's just the products build trust you have a fast sight load speed and that's all there is to it anytime I tried to build like a big beautiful website it always converted way worse than something like this and that's why this business model is so attainable to a lot of people is that you can do something very simple it doesn't have to be like a really complex buildout brand it can just be collection page product page cart checkout that's it and over time like I said we started ordering yoga mats and pants and holding a bunch of inventory and around like the 2 to three million markish is where things start to get a lot more challenging like from a supply chain standpoint so that's where you can either choose to keep doing print on demand like working with Printery or printful or you can go this route just depends on if you want it to be a Lifestyle brand or not kind of like this new brand that I've been showing in our 0o to a million print on demand challenge this is a new brand that we started up completely from scratch my wife and I Meg we just wanted this to be a Lifestyle brand we didn't want this to be like full-time job like 80 hours a week working on it we just wanted it to be like fun like we each spend like a handful of hours per week if that building the store and it's lower margin than we could get if we went like the 3pl route but it all depends on what you want and so these are two different case studies for different types of scenarios yoga stay I was full-time like it was my life my partner and I were working on it like non-stop along with three other brands which that's a whole another story always just do one brand but yeah yoga day we really wanted to build it out and see what it could turn into and with this brand we just are mostly doing it to as like a handful of hours per week we have no aspirations to grow this into like an eight fig Powerhouse by any means we're staying on printify slightly lower margins but still extremely profitable and it requires a fraction of the amount of time and this brand we started from scratch July 1 and it's on track to do seven figures within the first year I think we're going to hit it like 10 months within launch and this store we launched with about 50 to 75 designs and it was a basic store it looked like this one almost exactly like this just using the debut theme or whatever the default Shopify theme is I think they call it Dawn now and extremely simple we just chose a niche found that it was a passionate Niche that people were buying in because we did the bumper sticker test launched 50 or 75 designs and things went well so we started increasing the ad spend and now we're at that turning point where we could either decide to double down or we could decide to just keep making a Lifestyle brand and we like I already said we went the ladder but decisions up to you went through this in the print on demand challenge just showing step byep every week the sales updates and showing the p&l so you can go check those videos out if you want and some important case that I want to show you are a lot of failures that I had along the way and I'm showing you this so you realize that if this seems like too good to be true like I'm making it sound like it's too straightforward there's a a trail of Shopify store bodies behind me that makes me be able to say that follow this model and it works because I went through stuff like this like Royal cats where we were selling cat jewelry necklaces then we had a zodiology store we had Serene jewelry we we had a funny like tongue and cheek um like nature brand like a environmental brand where we sold stuff like save the chubby chubby mermaids nobody was buying this these were all examples of stores that performed extremely poorly but the good news is that we're able to learn from them and the difference between the losers and the winners nine times out of 10 just comes down to choosing the right Niche having enough highquality products that are based on best sellers that you see in the market from the research that we're going to do and that was all stuff that in the beginning I wasn't doing any of that we were just like basically just brainstorming oh maybe that could be good and then launching a store coming up with some products that we thought looked good wasn't really based on anything at all and then we would get poor results now we know a lot better we know to choose a really passionate Niche we know how to find and recreate really high quality like best-selling viral potential products and we know how to like read the metrics and iterate a lot faster so there's a trail of like failure stores that that have paved the way for these lessons learned that turned into stores like yoga day but it was not that just right out of the gate so don't think that I'm saying this is so easy like there's nothing to it there certainly is but that's why we're making this intensely Long training so that you can learn from all those lessons learn and for the people that are patient enough to get through this entire training you're going to have the benefit of 7 years of experience millions of dollars in ad spend and 20 plus million doll in sales condense down into 20 hours is so that's the idea idea and along with that you're watching the next case study in the making because as we're setting this up we are going to be creating a brand new store completely from scratch and then I'm going to be posting the after we launch this uh I'm going to be posting the day-by-day results as a case study showing how we're scaling that brand up from zero to six figures in sales I think we can do it within the first month or two and we're going to be sharing that in the community that you can building it alongside you and we're even going to be revealing the store name which the reason reason we're doing that is to help people learn watch along with us in real time the downside for that is the store is as soon as it starts doing well people there's going to be some people watching this that are going to a rip it off for sure but number two it's going to get spammed to death with bots in like the comment sections of our ads which tanks the performance because basically people who know how to code and create Bots will put up their own websites of the exact same products and then they will automatically create hundreds of accounts to like autod detect our ads and comment and reply to every single person with a direct link to their product that's their Drop Shipping from like China so it's terrible quality but they're able to get it cheaper so long story short the performance is going to get tanked eventually but the point of this is to show it as an example and to show that we're getting real sales even if it does end up costing us pretty dearly but anyway so those are the case studies to show you examples of like how this can work and another point that I want to make is that those stores were ones that that I have run and my wife and I have run but this has worked for dozens of other people and I've specifically helped like friends and fam start businesses like these they've scaled it to seven figures like people with no previous business experience they're just like passionate about a niche and they follow basically this exact process it's part of the reason I'm making this is that it's a very repeatable process that people have asked me about a lot of times so I'm just finally documenting all of it but that point being friends and family have their own case studies I'm not going to share their stores but they have case studies of hitting figures with zero previous experience they just followed this process rigorously so that's it for this lesson hope you found this useful I'll see you in the next [Music] one in this lesson we're talking about our foundations overview so what we're going to be covering in this module is perhaps the most important module in this entire course and the reason for that is this that 90% of the time when I talk to people and they say they have business issues or their sales aren't going up or their ads aren't working when you dig down into it what they really have is just personal issues and it's their own personal life that is really broken and the way that we're approaching this whole course is from the standpoint of if I have a friend or family member sitting right here next to me and I wanted to teach them everything that I know to start a success successful e-commerce business what are the things that I would teach them first and I used to just teach people here's the strategies here's the tactics here's like what I'm doing in the business and here's what's working here's what's not that kind of thing and even though was sound strategies and it worked like I was proof of it they were never getting results they were always falling short in one way or another and I thought maybe I'm just not a good teacher and while certainly some of it was on me what I really ended up figuring out was that I wasn't teaching the right things I wasn't teaching them the foundations that they need in order to be a successful entrepreneur and person to a larger extent and if you don't do that then it doesn't matter what tact you could teach them like the golden rules of e-commerce it's never going to make a difference cuz they're building a skyscraper on a foundation of sand it's always destined to come crumbling down it's just a matter of time and this quote is something that I heard from her MOSI about the people issues and or the life issues versus business issues but it's true for my own experience as well and I've dug into this and what I've figured out is that I think that most people think of success and what we've been taught is success is something like this it's like where we are now and you go through a period and you reach your goal and that's it and that's kind of what's portrayed to people and what we don't realize myself certainly before I got started what I didn't realize was that what success actually looks like reaching the goal what it actually involves is going through a period of extreme hardship and pain and transformation and then you get to reach your goal and no other courses really talk about is how to get through this period they give you like the tactics and say Here's how to run your ads here's how to find the products but the most important piece is missing and that's how do you become the kind of person that's able to reach that goal in the first place so that's what we're talking about in this lesson CU When you go through this fire nine times out of 10 people end up doing 180 and the reason for that is that they don't know to expect it they don't know that it's coming and they don't have the like mental Tools in order to get through it and what that ends up meaning for our goals a lot of times is that they end up dying they end up staying where they are and we just go back to where we were and we stay in place we stay in our comfort zone that's where dreams go to die to be quite honest is in our comfort zones that's why we're covering this now so that we can fully embrace the fact that at the intersection of pain and change is where you find growth and growth is what we need in order to reach our goals I know this might seem like slightly off topic from in e-commerce like Drop Shipping print on demand course but trust me nothing could be further from the truth cuz this is not here for the algorithm or to entertain people this is if you were my best friend or family member sitting next to me these are the things that I would teach you first because once I started teaching people this formula everything changed all the results changed pretty much overnight even though the business lessons and stuff that I was teaching them didn't change at all I was still showing them the same ad strategies and stuff and none of that really changed it was just how do you do these four things how do you utilize this formula so it's working for you instead of against you cuz if you're not aware of it it is certainly working against you so the formula for success is really energy I'm Focus time strategy divided by your mindset I'm going to talk about what this means but normally nine times out of 10 courses and trainings out there they just talk about the strategy piece they just say here's the tactics here's the buttons to click and they don't cover the rest of this formula that's why the four main reasons that people fail in this business and believe me there's going to be plenty of talk about the strategies and tactics it's should be like over 10 hours of it of just the tactics so we're going to get plenty of that we're taking an hour or so now to make sure we get the most out of that you know a dozen hours of the tactics the four main reasons why people fail is number one because of a lack of energy and they basically don't output the effort required and we're going to talk about why that is and how we can fix it the second reason is they have a lack of focus meaning so they could have enough energy they could be uh yielding an output of effort but if it's not going into the right things then it's all for nothing the third reason is they have the wrong strategy so they might have the energy they might have Focus which is rare but then they're putting it into the wrong opportunity and evaluating this stage is where a lot of people get analysis paralysis and it's by design by like social media platforms it's not your fault just that you know YouTube inundates you with tons of like social media marketing invest in crypto invest in your time into Drop Shipping like there's all these different like methods of making money out there that it's tough to know which one to focus on that's why we're teaching this course is about building an e-commerce business is it the only way to make money no certainly not but if you stick with any one really good sound strategy that's well proven for an extended period of time then good things will happen and the fourth reason why people fail is a loss or negative mindset basically they don't know how to handle the self-doubt that comes with you know going through this journey of going through the fire and having to become a completely different person in order to actually reach your goals and I always say that the people that I find are most successful at being entrepreneurs and running their own business are the people that are not the smartest they don't have to be like the brightest thinkers they just have the highest tolerance for stress and self-doubt and they're able to just keep on persevering when times get tough and they will get tough like there will be times doesn't matter if you have the perfect strategy of laser focus you have you know a marathon runner level energy there's still going to be times where you wake up and you have extreme self out and you're like what am I doing why am I doing this and all your friends and family around you the whole while are going to be like they love you but they're going to be doubting you just as well for a number of reasons we won't even get into that but uh it makes them uncomfortable to see you trying to change yourself and they're going to cast that doubt on you and unless you have a rock solid mindset in order to push through that you're going to end up crumbling and all of this whole formula goes away then it doesn't matter if you watch every second of this entire training if you end up turning back when the going gets tough then it's all for nothing so we're going to make sure that we have the energy that we need to do the output we're going to make sure we have the focus we're going to make sure we have the right strategy and we're going to make sure we have a mindset that's able to persevere through when times get tough so laying the foundation for our energy just means increasing the number of units of output that we have on a per day basis making sure we have the ability to get up and do the thing basically then our Focus we're going to make sure that our energy is being spent on the right things and things could really be singular cuz we only really want to be focused on one thing at a time we're going to have the strategy to get our eles back on track when things don't work out and when stuff like hits the fan and make sure that we're following a proven strategy which I've shown lots of proof already in this training that this is a strategy that I've been testing out for seven plus years it's worked for me and other people so it's proven and it's you know completely free so there's no ulterior motive here but then lastly we're going to have the mindset to handle our self-doubt and as a side note this is not going to be a long- winded over-the-top explanation in this module because I am well aware that a lot of L of people get successful and they start doing these weird habits and routines with their spare time and then they forget about what made them successful in the first place and then they start telling everybody that what made them successful was like doing cold plunges and stuff and so I just want you to know that this is going to be valuable because I'm extremely cognizant of that fact and my goal in this whole module is just teaching the be bones most tactical things you can do that has worked from my own experience things that I've tested and like just the best of the best biggest bang for your buck things that have increased my energy helped improve my focus the strategies that work the best and then the mindset and how I think through like the self-doubt dealing with you know haters and stuff like that how to think through all that stuff and on the mindset note also make sure you feel like you're not alone you're certainly not even though entrepreneurship can feel certainly lonely but those are my goals nothing more nothing less we're not going to go over the top here and at the end of the day I'm sharing all the tactics that work for me it's up to you like this whole thing just here's a buffet for you to choose what like pick and choose what