SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How To Launch Your First Conference with Ryan Moran of Freedom Fast Lane: Financial Freedom, Personal Growth, and Extraordinary Living
23 Jan 2016
Chapter 1: What does Ryan Moran focus on in his business?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: How can you effectively sell products on Amazon?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: What are the primary expenses in a product-based business?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Avila. He is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business. For your chance to win 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning, simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
Be sure to tune in tomorrow morning, Top Tribe. You're going to hear from Stig Brodersen. And I asked him, why did you quit a $100,000 plus energy commodity trading company for teaching?
okay top tribe good morning everyone's loving the show and you're gonna love our guest this morning his name is ryan moran and this is the bio he sent in i'm just gonna read it flat out he goes man i don't know i'm just ryan i do the online business thing and i invest the profits i help my subscribers build businesses and invest the profits too he really really really really really likes the cleveland indians he says i list a bunch of other credentials but who cares let's just inspire some people
Chapter 4: How does Ryan scale his business beyond Amazon?
Ryan, with that, are you ready to take us to the top? I don't even remember doing that intro, but let's go to the top. I love it, dude. So tell me what you're focused on these days. What's your main business? Well, I basically have two focuses. One is I'm kind of famous for building businesses that start off being based on Amazon and then growing them from there.
And then the other thing I guess I sell is myself because I do events and workshops and podcasts like this one where I try to convince people that I know what the heck I'm talking about.
Chapter 5: What strategies does Ryan use to capture customer data?
Awesome. I want to focus on your main revenue stream. So what was your main revenue stream in October? In October, the main revenue stream were the products and services that I sell on Amazon and those customers that we collect from there. Okay, so let's focus on that, especially because I'm generally very interested in this.
We had Scott Volker on back in episode 128 who educated me about BSRs and all this other stuff. Are you in his same space? I actually don't know the spaces that Scott's in. He's a buddy of mine, but we don't talk about our specific businesses. Well, that's what he told me.
He said people don't really talk about the space term because it's highly competitive, but he's generally in the Amazon space like you, right? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, so tell me about one of the things you're doing on Amazon to the extent that you can. Yeah. So, I mean, the process of Amazon is really like Google back in 2009, right? You want to rank for keywords.
You want to get good conversion rates so that Amazon sees you as authoritative. And a sale is like a link, and that's how you rank for certain keywords.
Chapter 6: How does Ryan's experience inform his approach to building sellable businesses?
The primary focus of ours, though, is Peter Drucker has his two rules of business. They're get customers and keep customers. And taking a sale on Amazon is neither of those. It's taking a sale. It's not taking a customer. When you buy from Amazon, you don't really know who you bought from. You just bought from Amazon, right? Who says, oh, I bought this thing from this company.
No, you say, I bought it on Amazon. So our process is step one to get to like that first hundred K a month mark that that requires ranking for certain keywords. But beyond that, then it becomes, how do we extract these sales and turn them into customers who love us and want to buy from us no matter where we are? And that's how we build what I would consider real companies.
So what was your total top line revenue just in this business line in October? In October, we did collectively about half a million a month. Okay, about half a million a month. And you said we, who is we? When I say we, I mean I have business partners. I have a team. I have a real team. Okay.
Chapter 7: What is Ryan's advice for launching a successful conference?
So of that 500 grand, talk to me about the expenses. Are you manufacturing the goods? Tell me about that. Yeah, the primary expenses when it comes to having physical products businesses are the cost of goods sold, which is kind of interesting because I come from the info product world.
And one of the things that was interesting to me was when I first started doing this business, I was like, where the heck is all my money going? Oh, right. I have cost of goods sold. So that's where the primary expenses are. There's a little bit of marketing costs when it comes to a pay-per-click. And we give away a decent amount of products in order to get reviews and to get our rankings up.
And then the team from there, those are our primary expenses. So I want to actually break those down. On 500 grand top line, what were the cost of goods sold about? Cost of goods sold is probably 30% of that. Okay.
Chapter 8: What insights does Ryan share about his personal growth and entrepreneurial journey?
So about 30% is about 60 grand. Oh man, Nathan, you're not asking the detail guy. So I'm ballparking it. Oh, that's fine. That's fine. Just asterisks in case anybody looks this up and is like, Ryan lied on the top. But it's 30, it's about 30% cost of goods. Yeah, that sounds about right. Okay. So, and I did the math wrong anyway. It's about this. That's about 150 grand if it's 30%. So, okay.
Then team cost. How big is your team? How many people? There are five of us plus on one outsourced person. So yeah, there's five of us that are, that are reporting regularly. So if I roll up the salaries and all those about how much are all the salaries combined? I couldn't even tell you probably 30, probably 40,000 a month. Okay. About 40,000 a month. Okay.
And then what are your other big costs? our other costs in the business. Yeah. What about like marketing? How do you drive sales? Yeah.
So sales come from, they come from, if we do like, for example, one of the things we'll do in our business is we'll do sales to our list or we'll do, we'll introduce a new product at a discount or we'll do buy one, get ones where we don't really make any money, but it still registers as us. So registers as revenue, but we don't make any profit.
Why do you do that just to get a higher ranking in Amazon? Cause they see more sales. There's actually a couple reasons for it. We'll do it because we want to get more... We'll do it a lot for new products. That's one of the things we do to get somebody to really like buying from us rather than saying, I bought this thing on Amazon. We'll do certain things in order to get people to...
to really marry into our idea or our vision as a company. So we'll do it for the customer. We'll do it in order to drive sales to something. We'll do it just to cause noise in the marketplace, to get people used to repeat buying from us. So there's a lot of different reasons why we might do something like that.
Okay, and about monthly, about how much total costs are there tied up in those kinds of activities? I mean, they don't really register as a cost, right? They just register as cost of goods sold. So at that point, we'd be selling some things at cost, and we will sell some things publicly at cost just to get a customer. Okay. But you don't do any, there's no like variable marketing spend.
You don't do any ads to drive to your checkout pages or anything. Well, I mean, we do, we'll do the Google AdWords thing. We spend some money on search engine optimization. We spent some money on Amazon's pay-per-click. We might sponsor an athlete. We might sponsor a blogger or we might pay out affiliate commissions. So those all kind of are variable marketing costs. Okay.
What's your affiliate deal? So there's some people who sell us on Amazon who just pick us up. And to be honest with you, I don't even know how that works. So there's people who will find out that they're just bloggers somewhere. And just like in the old ClickBank days, they'll pull up a product that is selling well, and they'll put affiliate links. That's all done through Amazon.
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