SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
What a 440 Person Amazon Community Looks Like (and its $1m+ in Revenue)
19 Mar 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
So you're doing less than 2 million a year in revenue, but still impressive for a community. How much did the community do last year in revenue?
So the community was over a million in revenue last year.
Wow, interesting. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka.
Chapter 2: What revenue did the Million Dollar Sellers community generate last year?
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Eugene Kamen. He is working on an elite e-commerce community called MillionDollarSellers.com, which is helping power an e-commerce brand he's building on the side as well. We'll dive into them both today. Eugene, you ready to take us to the top? Yep. Okay, very cool. So first off, what came first?
We're seeing a lot of e-commerce brands powered by community these days. Did you launch e-commerce first or the community?
So e-commerce came first. I started my brand in 2011 and then I stumbled upon this community which was kind of like a major catalyst to my success in e-commerce.
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Chapter 3: How did Eugene Khayman become involved with Million Dollar Sellers?
You know, Most of our members, once they join, they're a member for life. Even members that have sold their business still stay. There's a lot of other facets of the community that are not associated with business. We have an investments subgroup. We have subgroups about health.
uh and you know just people stay in for the long haul they make you know lasting friendships and that's a big thing for us and you joined when it was 50 members and what year was that uh it was 2015 yeah 2015 okay and you joined officially as coo who's the creator of this and how are you guys working together do you just rev share it or what so yeah our creator is ian cells uh
CEO and we're just, you know, equity partners in the organization.
Okay. I imagine that this is a high margin business. There's not a ton of expenses here. What do you guys do with profits?
So, I mean, we reinvest most of it into the team. So we're, you know, we're growing every single year, internal team members. How many on the team today? I know we have eight people. So like recently the, you know, biggest thing is like hiring, uh, you know, full-time support, the community full-time support for the, uh, the partners we have. It's a, it's a lot of work. You'd be surprised.
Got it. So the most expensive thing there obviously is headcount. What's the second most expensive thing besides headcount?
Uh, I would say for the events. So, you know, you know, things that we're doing that are associated with events, uh, software, probably a third, but yeah, the most, the most expensive is the team.
And so a lot of the most successful software companies these days are coming out of communities like this. I mean, why haven't you guys launched an, you know, an, a tool for like, you know, tracking Amazon prices of your competitors, something related to your community members, you can upsell to them.
So there have been a lot of, uh, softwares that were born out of this community. It's kind of a separate business, but there are people that have created softwares by partnering with other members of the community. There's been more than just software businesses formed. There's been product businesses as well. What are some of the software companies that came out of this?
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Chapter 4: What distinguishes Million Dollar Sellers from other e-commerce communities?
Uh, no, we, we feel that increasing the revenue threshold isn't the main concern. And also that that's not, you know, That's the reason why we don't charge so much. There are other competing communities which charge a lot more. Like which one? If you look at EO, for example, which is the biggest entrepreneur organization, their fee schedule is higher than ours.
But the reason we don't really want to do that is because you leave out a large chunk of people that are working in their business. And it's important for us to have those people involved in our community because those are the ones that are constantly adding value because they're the ones that are reinventing
The business, whereas other businesses that are already past that $10 million, $15 million threshold, they are focusing on fixing other problems. They're not working inside their business. So we don't want to alienate the solo entrepreneur.
Got it. I mean, I think if you want to say that you're going to be an exclusive group, you have to have a clear playbook for when you say no to people. And you're going to have to say no to more people over time if demand increases. I haven't heard you say we're going to say no to these X people.
So we say no to people that don't match our core values. I think the biggest thing is, first, you have to hit the revenue numbers, which is a million dollars during 12 months. But you have to be willing to share. You have to be willing to show up. You have to be engaged. That's a big thing.
How do you measure that? Do you use community sort of measurement software to see who's posted at least once in the past week or something like that?
Yeah, so we actually, I mean, Facebook, we communicate on Facebook and then we have other tools that we use to keep track of all of our members and a lot of the metrics from Facebook, we put them in to this tool and we look at, you know, if people are participating in events, if people are visiting the membership site, we're looking at a number of metrics to constantly make sure that everybody's engaging.
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Chapter 5: How does Million Dollar Sellers ensure its members are qualified?
What tool is that out of curiosity?
So our membership site is run on a tool called Wild Africa. Say it again? Wild apricot.
Walnut apricot?
Wild. Wild. Okay. Apricot. And then Facebook is our tool for communication. And we kind of have our own internal database where we loop all of it together. So we do have people in the software space on our team, but they're not associated with building software for that purpose. It's more so building it for ourselves.
What are some of the other largest sort of Amazon-focused communities?
Uh, I would say, you know, as far as I know, we're the largest, as far as revenue numbers, you know, in total, uh, we just did a census and we have over $4 billion in annual revenue amongst our 400 plus members.
No, I understand that. I'm just asking what are some of the other big ones? What? E-commerce fuel. Fuel.
And that's, that's based more around, uh, entrepreneurs that are, that have their own brands and like Shopify businesses. Uh, whereas, you know, our main focus on Amazon.
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Chapter 6: What is the annual membership fee for Million Dollar Sellers?
Uh, where we're, you know, that's the differentiator.
Yeah. But I mean, if I type Amazon seller into Facebook, I mean, hundreds of groups pop up with tons of members. You're saying you're unique in that you're only 440 members and you make more money than any other community in the space.
Yeah. Because those communities, they, they just, it's, there's just a bunch of people there. There, there's so much knowledge in this Amazon space that you need to filter there to figure out what to listen to. And kind of what we do is we filter that out because all of our members have been proven. It's, it's, they are successful entrepreneurs and not people that are just starting out.
Yep. Uh, got it. Um, moving into, uh, your e-commerce brand. So how will these two things work together?
So when I started my e-commerce brand, I was kind of operating alone in this Amazon space. And, uh, it was difficult because you have to figure kind of a lot of things out. There's no roadmap to success when you're trying to launch a brand on Amazon, especially in the years that I started it. And I initially focused on going into brick and mortar and selling into more retail channels.
But then I found this community because I was looking for a place to find knowledge and It really opened up my eyes to opportunities that I was missing in the Amazon space and really improved my business. I think that year after I joined, I increased over 100% our top line revenue on Amazon.
Well, that's not that helpful. You could go from $1 to $2 in sales. It's 100% over your growth.
Yeah. Well, I was already above the million dollar range. threshold. So, uh, it definitely was more than a dollar.
So this, this brand, when you say that you were selling over a million on Amazon back in 2015, when you joined, like, how do I go view your products on Amazon? Do I just type in EPRA?
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Chapter 7: How does Eugene Khayman reinvest revenue from the community?
It was a lot easier to find really reliable companies. back when I started and luckily I've maintained those relationships and that's been another big factor to our success.
Do you have exclusivity on these? For example, the crafted double wall glassware that you sell, can that same manufacturer sell that to somebody else like you that's a savvy marketer who can drive sales?
Yeah, they could sell to other factories, sorry, factories could sell to other brands if they wanted to. But on a lot of our products, we do have patents. So on those people wanted to do those designs in the, you know, in the same markets that we do, we can enforce that.
What's one of those? What's one of these products you have patents on?
Like, for example, our champagne flutes.
Okay, interesting. And what do you patent there? Just the shape or a process patent?
So most of them are design patents, yes.
Design patent, okay. Yeah, this is super interesting. Yeah, I mean, this is a space where margins get computed away very quickly. And so I'm always curious how e-commerce sellers are protecting. Usually there is no protection. It's just they control the traffic. And if you control the traffic, you control the sales. You control some traffic, but you also have design patents.
I mean, with Amazon, you don't really control the traffic. You kind of, you answer to the traffic correctly and you need to know like what buttons to press to make. And that's kind of where the community comes into play because the business is always changing and the requirements are always evolving.
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Chapter 8: What is Eugene's strategy for reducing churn in the community?
Anything else we missed you want to talk about?
No, I think you covered a lot of it. I guess I just wanted to talk about my success and how much I feel finding...
friends in this virtual type of business is very important uh and like you know that i attribute a lot of my success to being able to to find people that you know speak a common language yeah good stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book uh so i'm not great at reading but uh shoe dog was one that i made made it through pretty quickly number two is there a ceo you're following or studying
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?
I'm really liking Airtable right now for data management.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
I like to sleep, I would say nine to 10 hours.
Love that. And what's your situation? Married, single kids? Married and working on it. No kiddos. And how old are you? I am 29. 29. Eugene, last question here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?
Hmm.
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