Mark Sellar - How to win in eCommerce, and why China is the biggest opportunity people aren't utilising!

What happens when you mix wine trading in China, a million-dollar reality TV win, and a burning ambition for property development? 

You get the founder of three thriving e-commerce businesses - Shader Australia, Tumble Bear, and Phantom Hardware! 

Our first in-studio guest shares his entrepreneurial journey from a single product to a massive social media-driven business empire. 

He sheds light on the power of social media and compelling content in skyrocketing his ventures. 

Delving into the world of innovation and invention, our guest explains the genesis of Shader Australia and Tumble Bear. 

With a step-by-step recount of his journey, he drives home the value of validating ideas and investing time and energy wisely. 

Can you imagine crafting a business from scratch, right from research to development, testing, and ultimately its launch? He did it, not once, but thrice! 

He also cautions potential entrepreneurs about the pitfalls of creating something that already exists. 

Unleash the potential of social media. Learn how platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook can be leveraged to reach potential customers and distributors worldwide. 

Our guest elaborates on the importance of clever content when running paid ads and how deliberate errors can generate engagement. 

He also shares his insights into the product development process, describing the challenges and the steps involved, right from conceptualization to placing your first order. 

This episode concludes with a peek into the future of e-commerce. Discover the role of AI, the opportunity to sell Australian brands to China, and the exciting potential of live streaming in e-commerce.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

Alright, let's do it First live, we're live. We're live in the studio. Yeah, exactly, make Believe Studio Probably easier when I just get James to fucking do it next time. Alright, so let's. Usually I can look at the screen and then talk at the camera. So this week, talking to the camera, this week we're proud to bring our first in-studio guest to E-commerce Australia, who has created I'm going to do him a great injustice here by I'm sure you've accomplished more than this but the founder of three e-commerce businesses, including Shader Australia, tumble Bear and what was the third one, phantom Hardware Phantom Hardware, exactly. However, he's done so much more than that, as we'll get into. He's now the founder of Seller Capital, always got plenty on the go Previous history in winning a reality TV show as well and, from what I've learnt lately, he's a tragic and mad Carlton supporter. So usually we say commiserations, but good time for me to be a blue supporter.

Speaker 1: 1:22

You've timed this well, haven't?

Speaker 2: 1:23

you. I actually saw yesterday on Instagram we were 15th in round 15. Oh really, yeah, somehow we've survived. So yes, go the blues.

Speaker 1: 1:34

We played this weekend against Brisbane, so let's see how we go and thoughts on the game.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Well, I was at the Melbourne game and I think that was the best sporting event I've ever been to. The crowd was just insane. I don't think we played all that well, but we managed to grind out a win, which is what we seem to do really well. So, mate, I think we can beat Brisbane, obviously, but it's going to be tough.

Speaker 1: 2:00

Yeah, they haven't lost a game there all year. They've had the luxury of a couple of weeks break and there's no excuses for them. If you can get the job done, it's probably almost your grand final.

Speaker 2: 2:13

I'm not even going to get to watch the game because I've got a wedding on oh who does that Really?

Speaker 1: 2:17

That's typical of Carl, and isn't he?

Speaker 2: 2:19

My wife's best friend is getting married in Sydney, so I'm in Sydney and the wedding is over the game, so I'm not even going to get to. I wouldn't be one of those guys where I'm like looking at my phone or looking at the wedding?

Speaker 1: 2:33

I don't know. I wouldn't be able to handle that.

Speaker 2: 2:35

Anyway let's.

Speaker 1: 2:37

Maybe you turn your phone off and then watch it, but there'll be people that spoil the scores, I'm sure at the wedding, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 2:43

Now let's get into you, know your background and your journey into e-commerce. Obviously, one of the reasons I got you on I wanted to speak to you was around your product development, which is something that I haven't really we haven't really touched on in the podcast. But let's start with your background and your journey into e-commerce and then we can touch, we can talk more broadly around how you should have created products and then marketing to China and things like that. So, when did it all start?

Speaker 2: 3:09

So I actually the first business that I had, I traded wine in China. Yeah, so it started in my early 20s and I was trading wine, australian wine, into China, and that was on 36 now. So it was probably, you know, 15 years ago that I was doing this and I had a Chinese business partner, a guy who was in his 50s, a Chinese guy. I was getting the wine on the Australian side, he was getting the clients on the China side and it was quite young back then. Like it's a, you know, massive business now and since the tariffs had stopped, but prior to that it was huge and so we were sort of pioneering something. And then, as it turned out, it was probably one of my worst business experiences and it was an early one where the guy kind of cut me out once we started getting some really good success. So you know, I was a young guy, I made a lot of mistakes and, very ambitious, just didn't do the right things with the business structure and I was able to be cut out of that and so you know, that was my first taste of it and I learned a lot of lessons the hard way on that one, yeah, but then, as you said I was lucky enough to go on a reality TV show called the Big Adventure and I won that show and that the prize for that was a million dollars. So I was 26 with a million dollars Brilliant. And I always have been an entrepreneur.

Speaker 2: 4:28

And well, actually what I really wanted to be was a property developer, which I am now, thankfully. But there's only two ways you can be a property developer. You either have a lot of money and you invest in properties and develop properties, or you start building yourself up towards that. And so through my teens and early 20s I was trying to save as much money as I can, buy houses and go that way, and then, of course, I won the money. So then I got sort of you know, a leapfrog moment. Where I was, I had cash so I could invest in property and I did, yeah, and then, and then I had the opportunity with Phantom hardware. I started that in 2000 and, I think, 16.

Speaker 2: 5:09

I started that, I think, and that started off just as a single product. We had one skew, just the white Phantom doorstop, and it was the only product like the one skew that we had Really, and we sold it into one store in South Australia. So that business went it's moment. I suppose that really sort of just like a slingshot the business forward was we had a video that we did, and this is probably the power of social media. We had a video and we just we put it out on Facebook and it wasn't doing much, it was just, you know, some interest. And then there's a Facebook page called Nine Home, which is Channel Nine's home you know home version of their, of their Facebook page and it just it got picked up by Nine Home and then it just went. Everyone started sharing and sharing, and sharing and it went completely viral, had 50, 60 million views over the space of like a week or something, before things were going viral, and it was on Facebook too.

Speaker 2: 6:12

So like TikTok didn't exist.

Speaker 1: 6:13

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:15

You know Instagram did, but it just it wasn't as prevalent and it just went mad. And so that viral video, which we didn't spend a cent on any ad budget, it just was purely organic, that just sent that business forward so fast. And we got all of these distributor inquiries from all over the world. And so then, for a doorstop, for a doorstop.

Speaker 1: 6:38

It was just a really unique.

Speaker 2: 6:39

You know different, but it was very simple at the same time so you could see the video, you could see how it worked and it was very self-explanatory. Yeah, it was. With product development, always say like the simplest ideas are the best ideas and so, and that one was a really good one. And so that business because of a really good video and I talk about content a lot now the importance of having really good content and not just pumping ads into things you got to have clever content Because of that video. That business you know exists.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Yeah, right, ok, fantastic. And so that that phantom hardware, that was just the one product that you didn't know we did.

Speaker 2: 7:21

Yeah we expanded that out so quite quickly. After the video, people were saying, hey, can I get different colors and will it work on this sort of door? And all of a sudden, the skewer range went from one to about 40 or 50 quite quickly. And then the business got acquired in 2021 by a private investment group board and at that stage we were selling in about 80 countries, ok, and we had over, I think, a hundred and maybe a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty skews, wow, and so it really just it was.

Speaker 2: 7:55

It was one good product, yeah, and then it was good marketing throughout the journey and then it was getting distributors and then having really strong IP. So the fan of Dorsop had had, and has, really strong IP patents around the functionality of the stop, how the pin comes up and how the pin is caught by the striker plate. We patented that process, ok, and so we licensed that to bigger companies. And then those bigger companies rebranded the Phantom Dorsop their own brand. We supplied it to them and then that, you know, again helped us expand into more and more countries. So, yeah, it was. It was there's so many ups and downs, but it was.

Speaker 1: 8:36

I learned a lot from that business, yeah, yeah, interesting, and even looking towards you know Tumble, bear and Shader, like they're really simple businesses. I'm not sure of anyone's. I'm sure people have heard of them and purchased them, but we'll go into them in a minute. But it doesn't seem to me that you're scared of going to different markets that perhaps you don't know at the time or like what's the process for you? Probably skipping ahead a little bit here, but in terms of, like, new products, how did you come up with the Dorsop as well? Like what was the? So what was the need for that? The?

Speaker 2: 9:12

way that you invent, the way I invent anything is is actually just circumstantially so it's. I don't ever just sit down and go all right, I'm going to invent something, it's. It's not how it works, it's. You have to just be living your life. You come across something that happens or something that you just find inconvenient and you think, oh, there must be a better way than this. And so, like, for example, the tumble bear hats, which, for anyone that doesn't know, is a impact reducing children's hat. You can find them at Big W, baby Bunting they are. That came up just by having a conversation with my brother and more Josh. He we were having a beer and I said, oh, how's Sophie, which is his daughter, and he goes oh, yes, she's good, but she bumped her head and he showed me a photo and she had this big bump in her, in her hairline, and at the time I was like, oh, geez, that's, that's pretty bad, that looks bad.

Speaker 2: 10:07

Yeah, and he said oh yeah, you know, it's just kids, like they're so clumsy, they hurt themselves a lot, they just you know, she's bumped her head heaps of times. And it was like this, you know, or not light bulb moment, but almost like a light bulb moment, like there's got to be something that can protect kids from like every kid's pretty clumsy because they're fighting their feet, they run into things, you know they're learning how to walk and run. Obviously they hurt themselves and kids are obviously very precious and you don't want them to get hurt. And it was just like this moment. I was like surely there's a better way, surely you can do something to protect your kid's head.

Speaker 1: 10:41

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:41

And my mind went back to a product that I was actually presented years prior in America and it's a skull cap that people wear underneath NFL helmets. Ok, and it's just this very thin impact reducing foam. But it gave me the inspiration, seeing this foam work, thinking I wonder if that foam or similar foam could go into a children's hat to make it impact reducing. Yeah, and so it's such a simple product like it's. It's literally a kid's hat with foam in it. Yeah, but doing it. That's probably downplaying how hard it was to actually make it work, imagine.

Speaker 2: 11:20

But it still took a long time of developing the product making sure the foam could fit inside the hat so that you couldn't see it. Making sure that the hats actually did something, because you know there's no point having like a gimmick and saying oh yeah, they're good but they don't actually do anything. So there's a lot of testing we had to go through to make sure that they actually had impact reducing qualities and then and then we went live with that business. But, in answer to your question, when you, when I, invent anything, it is literally a just a circumstantial thing. You're either doing something or talking to someone and something happens that's either inconvenient or dangerous, and you think, oh, surely you could do something better. And then you come up with whatever that thing is that would be better. And then you just research it and see, you know, did I just invent something, or have I just come up with something that's existed for 10 years?

Speaker 1: 12:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And so how many of those sorts of different things like ideas that you've had? You thought it's a brilliant idea and you go, oh my gosh, it already exists. All the time literally.

Speaker 2: 12:25

And so people come to me quite often now through LinkedIn a lot and they say, hey, I've got this great business idea. Can I run it past you? And I always say, yeah, sure, go for it. Happy to. I'm always happy to help fellow entrepreneurs and inventors and you would be so surprised how often the ideas that these people have and me I've done it so many times that you get invested in this idea and you think you've invented something and you actually I don't know if it's out of fear that you don't wanna get let down but they don't Google it, they don't search to see if it exists.

Speaker 1: 13:01

And then when?

Speaker 2: 13:01

they do. It's like fuck this is everywhere.

Speaker 1: 13:05

I've literally invented something I got excited about it.

Speaker 2: 13:08

I've even given it a name in my head, and it's a product it exists, it's everywhere. So I always say to anyone developing a product like the first thing you gotta do is just Google it. Just make sure you haven't invented something that already exists.

Speaker 1: 13:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good tip. Yeah, and if you go too far down the funnel and you go, I should actually look at this. You gotta, you have to.

Speaker 2: 13:32

It's like that story I think it was in Africa somewhere the tribe, who were detached from society, so they didn't, they had no access to society, but they invented the windmill.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Okay, they actually invented it because they'd never seen it before.

Speaker 2: 13:49

So as far as they were concerned, they'd invented it, but of course it's been around for probably a century or longer, but they'd never seen one, so they actually did invent it. It's the same sort of thing. You can invent it. But just because you didn't know that it exists doesn't mean it doesn't.

Speaker 1: 14:06

Yeah, yeah true, I've never said, and so we've spoken about Tumble Bear and then Shader Australia, which I was on the website the other day. It's an awesome. It's an awesome a lot of your stuff and this sounds like a negative, but it's just simple, functional, one product type thing, and so I was on the website and, yeah, it looks amazing. I was like I need to get off on myself when I get down the beach and try and read and try and protect the face a little bit. How did that one come?

Speaker 2: 14:40

about. So Shader is. Shader's story is actually similar to that of Phantom in that it was an idea that we had. So we had a team, a small team at Phantom, and because we had the means and the ability to create products, because we had a team of people, a small team this idea was thrown around. Could we create a beach shade for just your face? That would protect your face, but you could still tan in comfort? And we were actually not sure if it would work.

Speaker 2: 15:12

When the concept was thrown around. We thought it's so gimmicky, but it has a place and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. But will people want it? So we put it on Kickstarter and I've never used Kickstarter before. It was the first time we'd ever tried it and so those people that don't know how Kickstarter worked, kickstarter is basically you have a concept, you create a prototype and then you put it onto Kickstarter and people support you and buy them or donate money towards your goal, your target goal that you would need to develop that product, and you've got I think it's a month, and then after a month, you either reach your target, or which is the cash, or you don't. And so we put it on Kickstarter and I think our target was $50,000 or something, or 25,000, I can't really remember, but the Kickstarter campaign just went phenomenally well and I think we did $200,000 in a month, oh, wow.

Speaker 1: 16:13

Yeah, and it went so well and then.

Speaker 2: 16:15

But that was similar to Phantom in that it was literally just a really good video, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:23

So we did a video. It was me and my wife down the beach using the shader with all of its functionalities and I still, even at that stage, a bit apprehensive, like I don't know if I fully believed in it. I just thought this will either be really good or it just will do nothing. And so we went live on Kickstarter and the first few days it did nothing and we thought, oh, like, this isn't gonna work. And then same thing it just you got picked up by a few pages on Facebook. Again, it was Facebook that did it and it just went nuts like it went totally viral. I think that video and variations of it got viewed 130-odd million times. It went nuts and so, and yeah, like again, like Phantom, it was just so important that we had really good video content and it wasn't ads-driven, it was just organic, it was interesting people liked it and it just worked.

Speaker 1: 17:23

Yeah, and UGC before UGC was probably a thing as well like no one would have been talking to UGC, it just resonated.

Speaker 2: 17:30

Yeah, and it just worked. And so, yeah, both of those, both of those have been really propped up by great content.

Speaker 1: 17:39

Yeah, yeah, awesome that's good I like it. I like it story on great content. And so how did you grow? Last question on these businesses, before we get into some product development stuff but how did you grow those businesses Did you put? Was it SEO? Was it paid? Was it just purely video, viral video with no paid component? Or what was the income strategy around those?

Speaker 2: 18:03

So with Phantom and this may not be, I mean, some of this would be relevant to today and others it wouldn't be because it was a while ago we had the viral videos, which were totally not paid and we didn't have the money to have sent for any of those, and that helped us get, I think, like that first big leap forward. But then with Phantom, we identified that probably the best place to make money with Phantom was through distribution, and so we got a lot of distribution inquiries from our Facebook content, and then we went and actually just started doing LinkedIn campaigns where we would identify countries that we weren't in and we wanted to say, let's say it was the UK, for example. We would just go use my LinkedIn so I picked up quite a few followers from doing this and we would just identify a country and then we would search for keywords. We would find the right people that were relevant to the companies that we wanted to work with, and then we'd use my LinkedIn, which is a premium account because you want it to be, show validity and show that it's real, and then we would just contact people over and over and over all day, not spamming people, like the messages that we'd write to people were authentic and personalized and just explaining our products, saying how well it's going, saying we'd love to expand into the UK and we would be looking for a distributor. And so we just did that in all these different countries and we expanded Phantom just so much through LinkedIn. So that's how that worked.

Speaker 2: 19:40

And Shader we kept predominantly e-commerce and Shader went from being organic content, which was really lucky, and then we then went into paid ads and so Facebook at the start of Shader converted really well and then the story goes doesn't convert as well as it used to. So now we've switched over to TikTok and to Instagram. So now we still are on Facebook, but it just doesn't convert like it used to. So now with Shader we do a lot of influencers, micro-influencers, and then we just run a lot of ads. But again, the content that we run and I say this all the time we don't just pump a heap of ads out continuously. We try and get really clever ads or really eye-catching ads, so that you're not just throwing money against the wall. You don't want to be really sort of focusing your attention on the right places so that they convert and you're not just blowing heaps of cash.

Speaker 1: 20:39

Yeah, that's right. That's never a good strategy, is it?

Speaker 2: 20:42

No, but I mean. So if you link up with a lot of agencies, they do just throw a lot of money at ads and I totally appreciate that you have to do that at the start, have a bit of a scattergun approach and work out what does work and then refine it. But I just think if you can put more effort and more time into your ads and that content is really compelling and clever and catchy, that time is really well spent.

Speaker 1: 21:07

Yeah, 100%. I guess it just amplifies the message. If it's a bad video or if it looks like an ad, it's going to get amplified as an ad and it's not going to get cut through. That's right. But if it's you know, if you're part of the, I guess, part of the community, if you're part of like, if you're negative to the platform and it doesn't look like an ad, you probably get much better cut through and the creative is kind of the thing that stands out on those platforms now as well. Like, if you have average creative, you just going to waste your ads.

Speaker 2: 21:41

I actually heard we've done this by accident, totally by accident, and it works. And then, after researching it, people do it on purpose and that is if you put mistakes in your ads and then people comment on the mistakes, so people will always pick up oh, he had a watch on his left hand and now it's on his right hand. Or look at the clock in the background it was 10 o'clock and now it's 4 o'clock and people comment on the mistakes. And we've had a few ads that have had either mistakes or the comments that you say in the video may not be factually correct by accident, and people just comment and comment, and comment. But then what that's doing is that's just fueling the algorithm and you're just getting it's like one of your best performing ads is the ads that have mistakes in them.

Speaker 1: 22:28

Yeah, yeah, it's just sorry to cut you off. It reminds me I had a client let's just call him a national sporting body. I don't know why I'm protecting them, but no one did anything wrong. But they had a player within their league and she said some things that perhaps weren't great and she was getting attacked on social media for what she said. It wasn't anything out of category, it just wasn't quite in the spirit of what she was after or whatever.

Speaker 1: 22:56

Anyway, they rang us because we were running ads for that round and they said you've got to cancel the ad because people said people comment, let's roll this thing, let's keep it like it's not bad as long as there's no, obviously it's not outside the boundaries, but people are emotional about this like we shouldn't be canceling it. We should let this thing run because people are emotionally invested and the more comments the better. So I think to your point it's a great strategy that works, as long as it's done tastefully and authentically. You can have a little bit of a play around with some mistakes. It's the same with emails as well. I don't know if there's an actual strategy around sending an email and then say, oops, I left something out in the email again. That's a straight out.

Speaker 2: 23:41

I don't like it but I think it works. I saw a YouTube video on a guy talking about the mistakes that he puts in his videos, and so he just puts tiny little purposeful mistakes. He does videography and photography and he did a 3D render. It wasn't a render, it was like a skateboard video a really high quality skateboard video that he did and anyway, the wheel comes onto the skateboard and the wheel was shown. The outside of the wheel was going onto the skateboard like this, and then in the next scene the wheel was back to front and he did it on purpose.

Speaker 2: 24:18

And everyone was just commenting it was wheels gone backwards. That wheel was back to front in the previous shot and he did it on purpose and it worked. He demonstrated exactly what he did and then he demonstrated the result. And it's not offending anybody. It's not factually incorrect. He just made a mistake and it just propelled this video.

Speaker 1: 24:42

Any kind of hook or anything you can get to people. Oh, hang on, I'll comment. It works, it works.

Speaker 2: 24:50

And that comes back to having that good content. Whether you're making a mistake or you're saying something a bit contentious, you need people to just be engaging with it.

Speaker 1: 24:59

What's the same as the Cane Corns effect, right? Not many people actually agree with him, or a lot of the time, but he gets cut through because he's polarising. So I think it's a bit of a lens of being polarising in terms of making some mistakes. The more comments, the better.

Speaker 2: 25:18

I actually saw Cane Corns in the Virgin Lounge last week. And I went and had a chat to him, because we were both standing there waiting for our coffees. Nice guy, I don't think most of those guys are.

Speaker 1: 25:31

They've got a job to get stats and to get you know, just baited he does a good job. He does it. He gets people sucked in all the time. He hasn't got me yet, but you know.

Speaker 2: 25:40

What we're talking about.

Speaker 1: 25:42

You've got a bit of a real passion for product development. We've got a lot of listening. That sounds quite egotistical. We've got a lot of listeners. Our listeners on the podcast are very much ecom enthusiasts. I'd imagine there is a group that are looking to start in ecom. You've obviously got good experience in that space. But where do you start? How do you actually develop a product? Can you take us behind the process of that? And then any lessons in terms of dealing with China and all those sorts of things, which is probably a whole nother podcast. What's the? How do you go from concept through to having an e-commerce store selling a product?

Speaker 2: 26:29

I don't even know. You probably don't even know this, but I'm actually just in the finishing stages of a course that teaches people. Now I feel like one of those guys doing a course because everyone's doing a buddy course.

Speaker 1: 26:42

That's it. I'm almost coming out.

Speaker 2: 26:45

It's actually not finished. I've been working on it, for I've actually been making notes. I've got a notebook that I make notes about experiences and things, and I thought I would pull it all together and make a product development course, because I allow or I welcome people to ask me questions on LinkedIn and I always try and help out. I was finding that there are so many questions with product development in such a broad process that you go through from the moment you have just an idea all the way through to actually having something you can sell.

Speaker 2: 27:18

There are so many steps and so when someone would come to me with an idea and they would say, hey, what do you think I should do next, I can give them the answer but then they'll come back to me again for some more help and more and more, because there are so many little individual steps that you have to take and if you take them out of order or you don't take some of them and just miss them all together, it can be quite detrimental and really slow you down and really cost you a lot of money.

Speaker 2: 27:47

And so that's why I thought I'll pull together all of my information and do a course, and I'm not, it's not going to be some sort of like you know masterclass secrets of the trade, like revealing his secrets. It's not like that at all. It's actually just me putting down in a course exactly what I do. So when I come up with an idea, these are the steps that I take from here's an idea, and step one, I Google it and make sure that I haven't just invented something that already exists. And then it's a step by step process, and if you can follow the step by step process, it's not that difficult. But if you've never done it and you don't know what to do, it's almost impossible to do it. Yeah, or almost impossible to do it well.

Speaker 1: 28:33

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:34

And so you know, even when I was developing, say, the fan of doorstop it was the first product that I developed there wasn't any sort of rule book or course or guideline that I could follow. There were a lot of individual pieces of information you could pull, like, for example, like how to, how to get a patent, how to get engineering drawings done, how to set up a website, how to you know all these things. You could kind of cherry pick and then learn, but then to piece it all together and know the step by step process that you have to take, you know, certainly not at the time, there wasn't really anything at all that did that. So I had to learn the hard way how to develop a product and I made so many mistakes. But yeah, I think, I think, I think once the course goes live and I'll start sharing it, I think people will find it very useful and it'll be applicable to anyone doing a physical product. It won't be tech, it'll just be physical product. But you know there are so many steps.

Speaker 2: 29:34

I think the course currently has 22 modules that it goes through and that's all the way through from just conceptualization to tooling drawings, to getting prototypes made, to placing your first order, ip. You know all the way through to shipping, shipping marks, you know. There's just so many little things you've got to get right. But, like you know, even the professionals make those mistakes, even today, and they can be really detrimental. So you might have seen just a few weeks ago that would he had to do a huge product recall because their children they did a children's would he, and they didn't label it correctly. With kids products, if they can be flammable in any way or if they're like a betting product, they have to have a caution flammable warning tag on it. And they didn't have that warning tag. So they had to recall them all. And of course it would he sell so much product.

Speaker 2: 30:32

It was just such a small miss that had such a big, you know, detrimental effect. And so that's what I'm trying to eliminate. For people, when they do want to go on a product development journey, is is just having a step by step process that they can follow so that they understand where they're at in the process, understanding the costs that they're going to have, and then they're confident enough to go through and finish it off.

Speaker 1: 30:58

Yeah, yeah, that sounds amazing. Yeah, I'm sorry I'm out for the course. I've got a few good ideas, well, but a few ideas will see if they're good or not. Yeah, in terms of sort of different products and things like that, it's always been. The hardest thing is to how do you actually get it there? From a timeline point of view, like what's the? I mean again, it's such a hard question to answer, but yeah, 12 months from from idea to samples, prototypes.

Speaker 2: 31:25

I think you could do it inside 12 months. Yeah, I do, and it well, again, it depends what it is. But I think one of the best pieces of advice that I would give to anyone who does have a product idea is to just keep it really simple at the start. Yeah, because with any product, no matter what it is, you will always come up with all of the extra things that it can and could do. Yeah, if you look at something like, say, you know the shader, the shader is a B shade that shades your head. Yeah, but the first iteration that we did on Kickstarter, it had a solar power, solar charge power bank. You had a fan. You had drinks holders. It had a pillow that you could freeze so that it was cold.

Speaker 1: 32:08

It had all this stuff, yeah Right.

Speaker 2: 32:10

But that all that extra stuff that we added at the start there was. There was too much product development to do in a short window of time, and so we ended up just making mistakes. The fans didn't work, the power banks we couldn't ship them through the air in a lot of air freight power banks All these things made what was a really simple product a B shade that shades your head. By adding them all, it actually just made it complicated, unnecessarily complicated. Yeah, and the people were buying it for its core use, and so I think in any product development it's great to have all the add-ons. That you're better off to just start with core functionality, your MVP.

Speaker 2: 32:54

Go live with your MVP, make sure people want it, and then you can do your add-ons in due course. Don't just launch with everything. Yeah, and also what that does is it also helps you just align your focus and make sure that you get that core product right. Yeah, and it's a really good, high quality product. You go live with it and then you can do your add-ons. And then also you get like a longer tail on your sales, because then you can sell to your core group and then add product and then retarget your email list with your add-on product. And then you can keep doing that, because if you just give everyone everything at the start, it takes forever to go live, it costs more money and then you don't have as long a tail on your sales because you've literally just thrown everything at them at the start.

Speaker 1: 33:40

Yeah, yeah, true, and then you don't. Yeah, as you say, that iteration process, you know. I guess you're still testing the market at that point as well. So just get one product does what it says on the box and then move on to improving it.

Speaker 2: 33:55

Spot on.

Speaker 1: 33:55

Yeah, a couple more questions. You know You've obviously done well with Econ brands. What do you think the? How do you think Ecommerce business owners set themselves up best for success? What have you seen that works well and what have you seen from a mistake point of view?

Speaker 2: 34:13

I think the margins in your products have to be really high now. Back when Facebook ads converted really well, it actually felt a lot easier than what it does now and I feel like it puts a lot more pressure on you as the business owner to have high margins in your products. So, for example, I've had products that were viable, say, four or five years ago anymore, just because the margins don't stack up. So you're always trying to find ways to ship a product cheaper to people or strip some weight out of things or manufacture something for less whilst keeping the quality high. So I think finding that margin, that high margin products are so important. And then, with all of my Ecommerce experience, having good add-ons is super important. So, like the shader, for example, one of our best add-ons is a towel. We sell a lot of sand-free towels and they have a low cost but have a high value. So people buy the shader and then we sell a bundle with the towel and that's our best product that we can sell. We actually don't make that much profit on one shader, but we do make good profit on a shader and a towel. So I think having clever bundles really helps Ecommerce and everyone does this and it's common knowledge, but having high margin add-ons just really, really helps. And then I think we're trying to use a lot of AI now to lower the amount of staff that we need and then also increase our output. So all of our videos are getting edited by AI and so the amount of content that you can put out has gone up a lot, just simply thanks to AI. So you're editing times are down, your cost to put video and content together is really low. So I think that's going to be a big turner, a big future for Ecommerce.

Speaker 2: 36:08

And then something I'm passionate about, and I work in this space and have been putting a lot of time and effort into, and that's cross-border business. So selling products in China is something that I'm really passionate about. So either business that sells Australian brands into China, which is the reverse way of how things normally go A lot of stuff gets made in China and then we buy it and it comes here that we sell products that actually often start in China. They come to Australia as an Australian brand and then we sell it back to China, because the Chinese market has a lot of trust in Australian brands. They see Australia as high quality, and so it's easier for Australian brands to sell into China sometimes and what it is for them to sell here in Australia. So I think there will be a really big future in selling into China.

Speaker 1: 37:01

The.

Speaker 2: 37:01

Chinese Ecommerce space is just astronomical, Like. It is so big and their influences, which are known as KOLs key opinion leaders are so influential. The sales that their KOLs create are just astronomical and a lot of that is through they do live streaming. So they do sales campaigns and they do live streaming. I think that TikTok is just starting to get into that, as a sales platform and I think that's going to be a big shift in e-commerce yeah, interesting.

Speaker 1: 37:37

So I've been talking about live shipping for quite a while and I feel like it hasn't really been done well here in Australia yet. But I don't know if you know Brendan Gillan, who works in this building as well, but he just released a video the other day talking about live shipping. I think we've been talking about it for a while. It's going to get there to a point because you get, you know, if you build up the event correctly, get people to then go live and then give them a fair value exchange. To take another one of Brendan's lines, it's hard not to work when you've got that captive audience there.

Speaker 2: 38:20

So there's a guy in China called Austin Lee and they call him the lipstick king and he has done a live stream that sold a billion dollars of product Like that's. You know, that's like Kim Kardashian exposure on steroids. And then there's another. There's a lady called Weiher. She sells all sorts of things, but between Weiher and Austin Lee, like, the amount of product that they can sell is just astronomical. It's all through live streaming and it's just, we'll catch on here. There is no doubt about it at all. I'm going to China at the end of October and I'm checking out one of the live streaming studios. They actually have rooms. Just it's like a big, almost like a warehouse, a big office, and it's just like a little room, room, room, room, with someone sitting in this purposely built room that looks, you know, nice for filming, and they're just sitting there live streaming and they'll be live streaming about this cup, and then they'll be live streaming about lipstick, and they'll be live streaming, constantly live streaming, and it's just a sales platform and they're just selling live.

Speaker 2: 39:28

Yeah, right, and it's that's I think will be, it will like it's, it's coming, it will be 100% in Western, in Western culture, Western society. I think it will become very, very prevalent in the next few years, because in China it is the way.

Speaker 1: 39:43

Yeah, yeah, okay, that's a good tip to leave us on Mate. I haven't probably got through a quarter of the questions I had, and even just sort of more questions come as we, as we chat. But before we go, seller capital, do you want to do, you want to give that that sort of what you're you're most in sort of invested in at the moment? Is that sort of the business that you're concentrating on at the minute?

Speaker 2: 40:06

seller capital is my, is my firm. I started when I won the TV show. I set up an investment company called seller capital and it's a family office. We just invest in different things. So we invest in e-commerce brands, I invest in in startups and I invest in property. So most of my investments are actually in property. Well, probably the most cash is in property. So I think, as I'm getting sort of through and more experienced, I identified that I can't do too much myself, so I can't run all these things. It's just not possible. And so when I was in my, say, early 20s and I was trying to do way too much, even in my late 20s I was still trying to do way too much and I was just finding that, you know, to fix a business that isn't working, the answer is not another business.

Speaker 1: 40:59

Yeah yeah, yeah, it's not the answer.

Speaker 2: 41:01

And so I have now, I think, just gotten better at identifying what can make money and what won't. And now my model is that if I find something that I really like and we spoke about it off camera before and we can't talk about it because it's confidential is a business that I'm working on in India and I really believe in that business and I really believe it can be massive, but I know that I don't have the capacity to run it as its CEO. So my model has changed a lot in the last few years, where if I have a business that I'm passionate about, I'll either invest in that business and make sure it's got a good CEO, a good general manager, someone to operate it, or I'll start a business, I'll put the money into it and then I'll put a good CEO into it. I don't want to be the CEO of these businesses.

Speaker 2: 41:51

It's not where my skill set is. My skill set is actually in doing business development, in identifying products at work, in doing product development. But actually being the CEO, I don't think is actually my strength, and so I think a lot. It's probably a good lesson for any entrepreneur or any startup person. Just because you're the founder doesn't mean you are the CEO doesn't mean you're the best person to be the CEO At the start. You kind of have to be because usually it's just you right.

Speaker 2: 42:23

At some point you might identify. Well, okay, I am the founder. I've been able to get this business now sort of over the first few hurdles. It's making some money. Should I find someone who would operate this business better than me and then I can focus? Maybe it's product development, maybe it's business development, maybe it's marketing. Maybe that's your strength. Being the general manager of the CEO is not actually your strength, and so that's sort of where Seller Capital sits. I do the investing and then I just make sure that I have a really good operator who runs those businesses. So even TumbleBear, I'm not in charge of TumbleBear. I own it. On the I guess I'm the chairman.

Speaker 2: 43:04

The founder I don't know major shareholder but I don't actually run that business and same as Shader. I actually don't run Shader because I can't, I don't have the capacity to run all these businesses. So I just make sure I have someone who's really reliable, a good operator, and they are the general manager, and then I support them, sit above them, help with the strategy and then grow the business.

Speaker 1: 43:27

Yeah, yeah, and that's it you can. Only you know you've only got 24 hours in a day like everybody else and you've got a family and so much other stuff going on. So I mean it makes sense. I guess it's harder to execute when you're in those sort of businesses, but if you can take that sort of helicopter view and you go, well, yeah, obviously there's someone better to be able to run these and take it further than what you can. Yeah, so much going on, so yeah.

Speaker 2: 43:54

Alex. He talks about it a lot and he's a great person to listen to and he's just spot on in that you are if you want to give yourself multiple revenue streams, you're better off to just focus on one, get it working and then diversify. Yeah, I saw him speak about this just last week or the week before and it's true. It's 100% right. I've done it the wrong way and I feel like now I'm doing it and have been for a few years doing it the right way. And when I look back at what I was doing in my early 20s, I was just running around like a crazy person, overworked, continuously trying to, you know, run this thing, run this thing, run this thing, and I was just underservicing all of them, whereas had I just focused on one, I would have got that one much further. Then I could have put a general manager in, then I could go to the next.

Speaker 2: 44:44

That's the better way to do it. And yeah, that's the way that I do it now, and thankfully I can do that because I've made good investments in property and I won the TV show. So it's not like you know, I'm some guru. I've just had circumstances that have allowed me to make mistakes and grow. As I sort of you know, I'm getting older and more experienced and better at being a businessman and an entrepreneur. I sort of reached this point where I'm like gosh, I was doing that.

Speaker 1: 45:12

Yeah, I know, yeah, I mean you think that, but you just can't put an old head on young shoulders. You can't. And if you didn't learn the lessons you're probably the best way to learn unfortunately is the hard way over time. So you've got to kind of, yeah, learn and evolve and adapt, but yeah, the same. Like you know, even starting this podcast, if you didn't want to start the podcast because you didn't want to be shitted at it, I was like, well, you're going to be shitted as a matter when you start. You can't fast track the tough times of the learning experiences. So, yeah, I think that's sort of that's going to set you up. Well, you know, you say you're old, you're 36.

Speaker 2: 45:50

Yeah, I'm not old, but I've not done a lot when I started and hopefully that's what people get out of these podcasts. They get to listen to me and they might be in their 20s or they might be older than me and they're starting their entrepreneurial journey, but they could listen to what I've experienced and go well, I'll learn from that. I don't have to make his many mistakes. I don't have to do go through all these trials and tribulations. I can just learn from this guy and I won't make the mistakes that he did.

Speaker 1: 46:19

Yeah, they'll make different mistakes. Yeah, that's right, you can't get away from it, but I appreciate you jumping on the podcast for the first in studio podcast. So, yeah, thanks again for your time. Thank you, we'll get through the next half of the questions at another time. I'd love to.

Speaker 2: 46:41

Thanks, mate Legend. Thank you, thank you.