Ryan Daniel Moran

Luis, Thank you so much for having me.

Ryan Daniel Moran

I started as an entrepreneur in my teens. I’m a son of a single mom and being an entrepreneur is kind of an impossible dream for somebody in my background. So when I decided to become an entrepreneur, I built all of my businesses around the idea of just going where there are already buyers and leads. Then I would just put myself in front of them and bring them into my business. That would be my starting point.

Amazon is one of those channels where there are tons of millions of buyers. Most of us are familiar with selling products on Amazon. Our buyers are on that platform and they’re already there. So if you can go in and step in front of those buyers, 100% of the leads that comes your way are buyers who have already bought into whatever it is that you provide as a company.

I built my first physical product business a little less than 3 years ago and centered it around selling products on Amazon for that exact reason because I had seen that process work in other businesses or other ways before or

Ryan Daniel Moran

If you have any sort of a physical product, Amazon’s obviously the logical place for you to get that initial group of hungry buyers.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Books are a little bit of a different animal than the other set of physical products. I have a group of about 500 entrepreneurs who are selling products on Amazon; from yoga mats, nutritional supplements, dog foods, baby shampoo, and to all kinds of other things.

I’ve personally been a part of quite a few businesses but I also have students who have built up hundreds of businesses on Amazon and you can sell pretty much just about anything that has value. And that’s the big kicker on the channel like Amazon, is you can’t get buyers and leads from something that’s not already selling.

The most important thing if you’re desiring to build a casual business, that is selling products on Amazon specifically, is to simply look up what’s already selling there. Then, you can have just about any product made by a merit of different manufacturers or wholesalers around the world who either make a custom product for you or will just take whatever is on their shelf and put your label on it and ship it over to Amazon.

Selling products on Amazon can be the best option for the physical products where there is a high-market demand.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Yeah, 100%! I mean, there’s no magic to it.

If you got an email list, that’s where your money is.

Because that’s where a pool of people that believes in your message already hangs-out. Or if you run a podcast and you get 5000 downloads of episodes. That’s a pool of people who believes in what you’re doing and your message.

We could build up our own channels and pools of buyers or we can leverage what somebody else has done and you can do both at the same time.

In fact I have a lot of students who built their businesses exclusively on Amazon and they have this fear that’s all going to disappear one day.

One of the things I encourage is to start building up their own pools of people and buyers by turning those sales into long-term customers, or by starting a blog or content channel where they can build up a leads and then send them over to their Amazon store for selling products on Amazon.

So they work hand in hand as long as it follows the rule of going where there are already people congregating, who believe in a message or sharing need that you can fill.

Ryan Daniel Moran

I’ve started them for as little as about $1000 but I’d recommend having at least $5000 to get a decent amount of inventory up and on a boat somewhere and being shipped over to Amazon’s warehouse. I would feel most comfortable starting with that amount of seed money when selling products on Amazon.

Ryan Daniel Moran

For me, I’m looking at what has a high volume for selling products on Amazon. That’s the first thing that I’m trying to figure out because I’m going to hustle and bully my way to the front no matter who’s trying to compete with me.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Things to consider when thinking of selling products on Amazon:

1. What’s selling the most?
2. What’s going to be easy to fulfill?

I’m looking at small, lightweight products.

One of my first selling products on Amazon was a yoga mat and this is one of the heavier products that I’ve ever done. I had a yoga product business called Zanac of Sports that I then sold a little less than a year ago. That was simply going to the manufacturer and we see that there’s lots of volume in yoga, finding manufacturers that can make superior products and be competitive on price. We came up with a good marketing angle for we’re going to present that in the marketplace. We got several product ordered very quickly and met our criteria.

We also had towels and blocks and got that over to Amazon and the work comes in when it comes to marketing. That’s where your work comes in because somebody else is doing the manufacturing. Amazon is doing all the fulfillment. They’re doing the lion share of the customer service. Your job then becomes to market the pants off your brand and to build on a thorough head of brand so that it stands out from everybody else.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Here is where marketing a physical product is very similar to marketing a book on Amazon.

It comes down to the conversion rate when selling products on Amazon and it comes down to the sheer number of sales that a product is making to rank for specific keywords.

This is why books are a little bit of a different animal because, what keywords do you want to rank for in books? It’s usually what the book title and the author.

Do you want to show up for just general keywords? If you do, then this approach wouldn’t work for that. If that’s not your way of doing things and this would be applicable to that but the way that Amazon sees or something as authoritative in those ranks, it is based on sheer number of sales and it’s conversion rate, which is determined by reviews.

Ryan Daniel Moran

So this is where someone who has an audience has a distinct advantage when selling products on Amazon.

If you’ve got a podcast, blog or you have an email newsletter and 10,000 people follow you and you’re able to send them quickly over to a listing whether it’s a book or a product that you’re selling.

Having an audience will have a much larger impact than if you just sit there and run some paper click and get some sales going.

A lot of people have built profitable businesses doing that but if you have a way to click start it that is really where the gold is so you can elbow your way to the front of the line.

Ryan Daniel Moran

The best way to do it is just to test different prototypes before selling products on Amazon at large scale.

There are many manufacturers in the US, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia. They’re all over the place. So when we are filtering out many manufacturers, we’re looking at communication skills.

1. Is somebody giving us the information that we need quickly?
2. Is their price competitive?
3. Is their English on point?

Based on that, we know who to order samples and prototypes from.

One thing that we learned pretty early was to do this process regularly as long as you are selling products on Amazon.

One day I stopped a bit at my business partner’s house. His name is Shawn, and he had two new yoga mats with the Zanak of Sports logo on it. He put them on the floor and he’s like, “Just on a whim, I decided to order some new samples from some new suppliers just to see if somebody could do what we’re doing and maybe doing it better.”

He had these two mats and one of them was our original mat and one of them was a new mat that he had ordered from a different supplier. I stood on the new mat and I went “Oh my goodness. This is so much better. How much more is this? I want to upgrade to this one.” And he said it’s a dollar cheaper per unit. Our cost per unit was five bucks, so he cut our cost by 20% and had a much superior product because we were continually shopping new suppliers. I wish we had done that from the gecko but my approach is to look at three to five order samples and prototypes from each one, go with the one that is the best and then continually have the conversation with them proving your product and driving down your cost over time with different suppliers.

Ryan Daniel Moran

It’s funny you should ask this because I was telling to somebody this story this morning that as a kid, I used to love to watch Cleveland Indians play. And after losing consecutive seasons, I turned to my dad one day and said “Dad, I’m going to own this team one day and I’m going to turn them around into a World Series winner.”

Ryan Daniel Moran

I’m from Cleveland, Ohio. It doesn’t get more blue color than that. That kind of a dream is impossible to the circle that I grew up in. Even as much in our circle that is about hustle, dream big and “you can do it”. I still get weird looks having that dream and an entrepreneurial changed the world circle. So we think it’s possible to do the impossible of starting a business around selling products on Amazon and going against the grain or whatever everybody else in society does but going big that we still think that’s impossible.

What I have found is that as entrepreneurs, we tend to hit this point where “I can believe I can do it”, “I can believe I can get to this point” and then we stop or plateau because we have reached our point of what we believe is possible.

In our world of entrepreneurs, we have what is talked about as of being normal.

Ryan Daniel Moran

With a dream like that, it can be lonely gain being on a path when other people think you can’t do it whether it’s starting a business or growing the business that you have. So I brought in either my mentors or people that I wanted to be around who have just exploded that paradigm.

I brought in Grant Cardone because he owns approximately $350 million in real estate. When I heard that, I followed him because I said “Hey! That would be a nice down payment on the Cleveland Indians, $350 million.” And I’m bringing in the billionaire founder of pricesign.com, Jeff Hoffman.

Our community doesn’t tend to play at that level. We don’t think at that level. And I thought what if I brought in Grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk, the billionaire founder of pricesign.com, Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank, my mentors and people who are changing the game. They aren’t just talking about changing the game but that were examples a few people hear of and that are really changing the conversations and exploding paradigms beyond what we tend to talk about as a community.

What would happen if we put all of them in a room together and we had more of an up leveling of our businesses and our minds in 3 days of what would normally take 3 years? What if we could dense it down into that? That’s when I came up with the idea to have Freedom Fast Lane live and I invited all of these guys to explode those paradigms.

Ryan Daniel Moran

I’ll give you an example. One of my current business started with $600 and now in sales about $300,000/month. A couple of years ago, that would have been big to me. But now that I’m there, that level has demystified to me. It’s not a big deal anymore because I’ve done it.

Once you’ve illuminated one level of the impossible, the next logical question is “What’s the next level of impossible that is just a BS story in my head?”

Ryan Daniel Moran

I’ll give you an example. One of my current business started with $600 and now in sales about $300,000/month. A couple of years ago, that would have been big to me. But now that I’m there, that level has demystified to me. It’s not a big deal anymore because I’ve done it.

Once you’ve illuminated one level of the impossible, the next logical question is “What’s the next level of impossible that is just a BS story in my head?”

Ryan Daniel Moran

For me, I need to get around those who are at a hundred million dollar level and beyond. And I thought, if I could do that in a condensed period, I’d have an internal shift that would take me to a different level and shift my paradigms. I calculated it once.

I think it was like, if you wanted to hang around the entire group that we assembled, that would cost like 300 and some thousand dollars. Partially, because I know what we paid some of them to show up and we’re condensing it into three days to create that same shift that you’d have if you built your first million dollar business. What kind of path would that open up? Also, what would happen if you just spent three days of people worth a hundred million dollars and up? What would that do to your internal paradigm calculator if you will explode it?

Ryan Daniel Moran

Thank you for that. I mean, you’ve done the impossible. No one expected you to do what you’ve done and when we look at it that way.

We realized there is no impossible. There is just what we can wrap our heads around. So we stay in tuned to whatever it is that is most in alignment with the type of lives that we want. If we surround ourselves with those who have done it, all of the sudden the impossible is completely demystified. It’s illuminated. It’s normal now which makes it very easy and congruent to simply move towards it.

Ryan Daniel Moran

I think the best thing that somebody can do is to change the input that goes into their brain. That comes down to reading higher level books, and listening to higher level podcast. It means getting into groups of people that are beyond where they currently are and changing what’s the internal temperature is of what they expect out of life for their business or whatever it is they want to change.

If you change what you perceive is normal, then you naturally move towards something different.

And we all have a baseline in our brain of what’s acceptable when it comes to fitness, money or relationships but it’s all just determined based on our experiences and what we hear about. If we change those things, we can change what we perceive is normal and thus get different results.

Ryan Daniel Moran

If I could just say one thing to somebody, it’ll be, we live in this world where we can listen to as many opinions as we want and as much information as we want. We can now go listen to pretty much any thought leader in the world talk for several hours just on YouTube and it’s all free. And yet we have more internal conflict and more distractions than we’ve ever had before because of that same thing. It’s both beautiful and frustrating at the same time.

So here is my recommendation for everybody.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Be intentional about what it is that you want to experience out of life. If you’re clear on that, then you can cut out all of the noise and just move towards what it is that you want and what you want to experience. You can align yourself with people who are on that same wavelength or on that same path. Without that clear distinction of where you’re going or what it is that you want, it’s impossible to filter out of everything else.

I think that’s why somebody will fonder of saying “I think I want this but this also sounds really good and I heard this idea from this person.”

That’s a good way to end up confused, depressed and frustrated.

I recommend tuning into exactly what it is that you want to experience and then aligning yourself both thought-wise and with who you associate with to move towards that.

Ryan Daniel Moran

Thank you so much for having me.