#82: The Rise of Microbrands

Episode:82 

Title: Norman Farrar introduces Colin Campbell, an Internet pioneer, serial entrepreneur and Founder of .CLUB Domains.

Subtitle: The Development of eCommerce 

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-82-the-rise-of-microbrands-colin-campbell/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Colin Campbell, an Internet pioneer, serial entrepreneur and Founder of .CLUB Domains. 

Colin is an internet pioneer since 1993 and has co-founded several Internet and technology companies. In this episode, he discussed the rise of the micro brands and the shift of consumers to buy online. 

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

In this episode, we discuss:

• 04:15 : History of the Internet
• 09:40 : How Amazon Developed
• 16:13 : The Rise of the Micro Brands
• 20:10 : Having a Good Domain Name
• 24:53 : Milton the Cat
• 34:14 : How to Increase Email Subscriber List Organically
• 39:48 : Subscription Services
• 48:28 : Unexpected Moment of Delight
• 55:23 : Colin’s Top Guerilla Marketing Techniques
• 1:00:02 : Does TLD strength matter?

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Explore these Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets by Geoffrey Moore
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• https://miltonthecat.club/
• https://www.paw.com/
• Google AdWords
• Pinterest
• Clickfunnels
• https://names.club/
• The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow
• https://www.uspto.gov/

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Norman  0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the Rise of the Micro Brands.

Norman  0:21  

All right, so for today’s show, I am really excited to have our special guest on. In fact, the podcast would only be called Lunch with Norm. He came up with the rise of the micro brands during a conversation that we had. His name is Colin Campbell, and wait till hear his backstory. It’s incredible. He was on I Know this Guy. He’s one of our very first guests and if you want to check that out, he’s got an amazing story. So I can’t wait to talk to him. Now Kelsey, where are you? 

Kelsey 0:55  

Hello. Happy Monday.

Norman  0:56  

Happy Monday to you.

Kelsey 0:57  

How are you doing?

Norman  0:59  

I’m doing fine. Very good.

Kelsey 1:02  

Fantastic. All right. So if you guys are new to the show, you can find all of the replays and highlights from today’s episode or any of our guests right on the YouTube Channel. Youtube Channel is Norman Farrar so just search that or Lunch with Norm, and all the episodes will appear and if you’re tuning in right now, you can hit that smash or smash that like button and ring that bell and give us a share. It’s a lot of great, great stuff. But before we get started, we do have our Facebook group here. Join the Beard Nation. It’s right here. So just search. 

Norman 1:40

So that’s the official name. Is it? 

Kelsey 1:43

The beard nation.

Norman  1:42  

The Beard Nation. Got it. Alright, perfect.

Kelsey 1:47  

Join the nation. It’s thriving. Yeah, it’s great. I hope you guys all had a great holiday too. We know we had a ton of people tuned in for our special Christmas episode, which is awesome to see.

Norman  2:02  

You guys, you blew me away. We were doing this to be consistent. We wanted to give some good information on Christmas Day. But when we saw the amount of people that came through, we were really happy that we did the podcast and sticking to that, Kelsey is rolling his eyes because he’s probably not going to be feeling too good. But on January 1st, we’re going to be also doing the podcast which is on Friday. So sorry Kels.

Kelsey 2:26  

Yeah, no problem.

Norman  2:28  

Hey Radd, how’s it going?

Kelsey 2:28  

Welcome, Radd. Yeah, if you guys are here, you can go on and comment in the comment section. Yeah, love to hear from you and let’s get this thing started.

Norman  2:42  

I’m supposed to say that. You keep taking my lines. Alright, so if you do have any questions, just go over to the right hand column. Oh, Marina, how are you and just throw them over any questions over to the comments section, we’ll get right to them. If we don’t get to them, right after the podcast, we’ll try to answer everything. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy this show. It’s going to be awesome. Mr. Colin Campbell.

Colin 3:13  

I’m excited to be on Norm. I’m out working on my beard. I’m a little bit behind you. But I’ll check out the Beard Nation.

Norman  3:19  

I wish I could work on my hair.

Colin 3:24  

You got to grow it somewhere.

Norman  3:25  

Yeah, that’s right. So how’s it going?

Colin 3:29  

Going great. We’re having an incredible eCommerce season over the last two months, things are just going through the roof. Sadly, we see a lot of businesses struggle in Canada and in the United States. But eCommerce businesses are thriving. Thank goodness.

Norman  3:46  

Yeah, I agree. Now, there’s probably a few people here that have no idea who you are. You want to just give a backstory because you’re one of these guys that are the most humblest guys I know and just a great entrepreneur, probably one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met in my life and you’re just so humble. Can you tell us just a little bit about yourself before we get into this?

Colin 4:15  

Thank you for that Norm. I’d like to talk a little bit about the history of the internet from an entrepreneurs perspective and just take you through a journey just very briefly here. I graduated from university in 1993 and my brother and I launched a BBS that was a Bulletin Board Service. Now I know Norm, you probably know what that is. But Kelsey, I have a feeling you probably do not.

Norman  4:40  

It’s like a TV station.

Colin 4:41  

Exactly. We launched a bulletin board service where people would connect, through phone lines and talk locally. Shortly after that, we launched an internet access module on that service and we launched applications and some of your older listeners will remember some of those protocols. Shortly after that though, in 1993, they launched Mozilla, launched the World Wide Web, and it began to take off like mad and we launched an ISP in Canada, the largest ISP, independent ISP in Canada, which we took public in the 90s and sold it in the late 90s. At the same time, we launched a software downloads service, which some of your users may remember called Tucows, and we rated software by the number of cows. It also launched a domain name registration business as well and today is the second largest domain name registration service behind GoDaddy. Following that, we launched into Hostopia, which was a hosting service that was run over the internet. So it was similar to the way Google was running search, we were running a hosting service called clustered server hosting, we were one of the pioneers in that space. Back then we would call it ASP or application service provider, and then later, software as a service and then now we refer to that as cloud. It hasn’t changed much technology fundamentally, it’s all about accessing information over the cloud and following that I launched into a new company, called a .club. .club is an alternative to .com, .net, .org. It’s a great domain extension for people who are interested in starting membership businesses, or eCommerce businesses or other businesses like that. Now, what I’ve learned through a number of these companies, and what I’ve seen are a number of patterns and this is very interesting. In what I referred to early on, setting up the ISP, we began to see the advent of people connecting to the internet and then a huge number of businesses starting around that concept, and believe it or even Amazon, it started in the early days of dial up Internet access. In 2000, we saw the advent of broadband and again, this was a different paradigm shift because now you could do things where you on broadband that you couldn’t do on dial up Internet, and we saw a paradigm shift around video watching in YouTube starting up and a number of different podcasts today, this would not be possible Norm without broadband without the advent of that. Following that, in 2012, we saw the deregulation of domain name extensions and that’s when we launched into .club, the new domain extension, which is a great domain extension that really emanates a luxury quality, exclusivity membership. It’s something that is very different and distinct than a .com. Like .org, it has a meaning after the name and we’re very excited that we launched that domain extension in 2012. But what allowed us to do that business and what allowed us to do all of the other businesses were what I call a paradigm shift in the way that people behave. Okay, I’m going to talk a little bit about that today. In 2000, we saw the paradigm shift from slow band or narrowband internet to broadband internet and that brought about a whole new set of opportunities in the marketplace. Probably one of the first companies to grab on to that was a company called salesforce.com and I don’t know if you remember their logo, no software. Well at Hostopia, we developed software over the internet and in fact, we’re one of the first to offer a cloud solution in the hosting space and that included site design applications, eCommerce applications and the like. Today you think of companies like Wix and Weebly, and even GoDaddy who do the site design services online, you probably can’t imagine, especially you Kelsey, downloading an application onto your computer, building a website and then uploading it. It’s just an almost foreign concept to you. Just huge opportunities started around each of these paradigm shifts. With .club there was a deregulation. So instead of a change in technology, we saw a deregulation and that deregulation was opening up the number of domain extensions. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers globally opened up all of these new domain extensions working with literally every country in the world. It’s quite a huge moment for the internet to be able to access other domains other than the standard .com, .net, .org.

Colin 9:40  

The adoption of those names are taking time as it often does. Now, let’s shift over to Amazon for a minute here and talk a little bit about the way that they’ve developed. Back in the 90s, they were obviously a book reseller, people would log in with their computer, they would wait for the screen to load up and then then you’d order your book and it would come to you a week or two later. It was something that began to catch on relatively quickly. But there was a hesitation amongst the population and the hesitation was really fundamentally about do I put my credit card into this cloud and is it going to be sort of like, go all over the world, and is it really secure, and that is what’s called a discontinuous innovation and if you ever really want to get deep into this, Geoffrey Moore Inside the Tornado and Crossing the Chasm, written about 20 years ago, he really does dissect technology adoption curves, and does a very good job of it. So Amazon, launched into a number of other products and services and really has become the behemoth in the space and then all of a sudden, we begin to see the rise of micro brands and an example of that is Zappos. They were probably one of the first companies to do that. We saw Warby Parker, I’m actually working now with another, a company called Hip Optical and they’re more of an edgy version of Warby Parker. I now buy my jeans from a company called Mott & Bow. I bought my knife set in my kitchen from a company called Mizen. We recently saw a sale of a company called MVMT for about $100 million. Incredible. So we’re starting to begin to see values of these companies take off as well. A company I invested in and I’m the largest shareholder in is a company called paw.com and this is a company that has unique dog products, very stylish dog products. Another company I invested in, which is a cat company called Meowingtons, who have some incredible cat trees that they’ve spent years designing and our marketing. We’ve seen some pretty amazing eCommerce sites like chaos.club and soap.club. So I mean, there’s just sort of a history of the internet, what we’ve seen as a paradigm shift occurs, I’ve tried to catch the wave, caught that wave and then build the company from that and I think right now, what we’re seeing is the adoption of users accessing eCommerce sites directly, because they’re comfortable with the idea of the notion of putting your credit card online, that was really the one thing that held it back, and by the way, in many countries around the world that still exists and there are some countries like China who’ve launched applications like WeChat, which manage most of the way money flows within the country in a safe way. But the fact of the matter is, eCommerce was fueled by the advent of people changing their behavior with respect to how they manage their credit cards. Now, like never before, we’ve seen the rise of micro brands, and it is incredible that these companies are competing with the behemoths of Amazon and Wayfair, and others and it’s pretty exciting to see that paradigm shift occur.

Norman  13:26  

Okay, so before we talk a bit more about micro brands, I just wanted to give a couple shout outs here. Andrew, all the way from Jakarta. Hey, how’s it going? I’m not sure who the Facebook user is Kels. Mark, how’s it going? Dave Apperley. Hey, there’s a familiar name. Daniel, how are you? How are you? Victor, good to see you and now let’s talk about micro brands in general. So the definition of a micro brand. What is it?

Colin 13:59  

Yeah, so I mean, I think actually, the bigger question here is, what happened to the brick and mortar stores?

Norman  14:04  

True.

Colin 14:05  

Why is it that Pier One couldn’t have been the new wayfair? You know what happened to them? Why is it that Blockbuster didn’t destroy Netflix, it? Why wouldn’t Blockbuster simply adapted to this paradigm shift to broadband, which enabled video streaming on the internet? I think that’s a perplexing question. I do have a little bit of insight into that, after I sold Hostopia in 2008. I worked for a Fortune 1000 company and the fact of the matter is, is that innovation in these larger companies. I’m not saying every company, I know Google, Apple, they have ways of keeping innovation alive in larger organizations, but in a large number of these Fortune 1000 companies, innovation really is not there and a lot of that has to do with the entrepreneurial spirit that lives within organizations. Fundamentally the reward for an executive to put their neck out risks their reputation in that organization, if it does succeed, they might get a small pat on the back. As an entrepreneur, if they do that, they get a huge payout at the end of the day. So the fact of the matter is, it really does lack that entrepreneurial instinct and so the ecosystem is based upon the concept of these Fortune 1000 companies acquiring the innovators, the smaller brands, these micro brands in the marketplace. So I think, back to your question, if you repeat it cuz I totally went off?

Norman  15:38  

Sure. So we’re just defining micro brands, right now, probably a good chunk of the audience that’s listening might be new to Amazon and they’re wondering why they should private label something and can they make it when you’re looking at the big brands? So let’s take a soap.club. How can you compete against a Dove or an Irish spring? So that’s basically what I want to get around. So first, let’s define micro brands and then how can you compete against the bigger brands?

Colin 16:13  

Yeah, obviously, if you go back in history, you could argue that there were brick and mortar micro brands like Lululemon. Right? Where they really specialize in a very specific area, they do a better job at one particular thing than any other company out there. We saw the Walmarts, and the Kmart and the Target, obviously dominate in retail. But we saw the rise of those brick and mortar micro brands do rather well, because ultimately, they served a particular market better than anyone else. I think what we’re talking about today is the rise of online micro brands, companies like MVMT, a watch company. Why do I buy my jeans from Mott & Bow? I mean, why? I think it’s a personal decision when it comes down to it. But if they fit, and I know the size, it’s so easy for me to just go online and click on it. I would like to talk a little bit more about how micro brands, these online micro brands can really compete with Amazon, as well. 

Norman 17:21

That’s the next question. 

Colin 17:22

Alright. So with the rise of the micro brands, how it’s all connected. I talked about credit card adoption. The other pediment for these smaller micro brands to start, really was the technology. To start an eCommerce site 5,10 years ago, you’re probably talking $100,000 plus, just to get in the door. I mean, and we know one thing about eCommerce experiences that gotta be perfect. I mean, Amazon set the standard high, you either deliver it the standard, or you’re not in the game and so the first thing is the website and the game changer in the world right now is Shopify. Shopify has totally leveled the field, you could open up an eCommerce store for less than $100 on Shopify, take a particular niche, do it better than anybody else, and launch it on Shopify. So that’s the first thing. The first thing that that sort of enabled these smaller micro brands to take off is that technology, there are a few other ones, other technologies out there and I know Shopify can be very expensive. When you start to get into higher sales volumes, at paw.com we’re about 30 million and we have about 100,000 a year in costs for Shopify. However, I have to say the user experience is unbelievable and unmatched by any technology platform out there, and it’s become the standard and there’s a lot of companies that build around that standard to enable that small business to launch. So the first thing is Shopify. The next I will say is content and let me give you an example of that. Meowingtons, which is our cat eCommerce site. We have five, six employees at Meowingtons and we actually produce a daily comic strip and it can be found, by the way at miltonthecat.club, if you want to sign up to it, and they’re absolutely hilarious cartoon comics. I’m not a cat person. But I download it every day I see it on Facebook and the fact of the matter is just this tiny little organization provides cartoon strips. They provide how to articles, some of the most popular articles on the internet with respect to cats and they’ve garnered more than a million followers on Facebook and Instagram and probably a couple million if you add them all together and it’s just a tiny organization. Now you think about Amazon, this trillion million dollar company and I don’t think they have a cartoon strip. I mean, what would it be about?

Norman  20:07  

Jeff Bezos.

Colin 20:10  

Jeff Bezons and exploits? Exactly. So it’s very interesting. But building a relationship with your end users through content that’s valuable to them, really sets you apart from the larger companies and it’s not that expensive to develop this content and by the way, if you have a passion for what you’re selling, the content can flow very easily. Even if you’re not writing it, you can direct others on the topics that you want to put out there. So we start with Shopify, we add content and then the other thing I will say is, the companies these micro brands need to have, they don’t have to have but it’s a lot easier to succeed if you do have a phenomenal domain name, like paw.com, or like soap.club. Domain names that have good SEO value, that where if somebody were to type in paw on the internet on Google, that they’ll come up top page on Google. Domain names do help your SEO, and they do help you position as a leader in the space. I think it’s more important today for online eCommerce businesses to have a great domain name than it was for brick and mortar. Because in brick and mortar, you didn’t necessarily need to go to a website to understand what they were selling or what they’re doing, you just walked in the store. I do think of the amazon.com versus Barnes and Noble, and how Barnes and Noble fumbled with their domain name for years because it was really just too complicated to type into the web browser. So I think a domain name is another aspect of that. The next thing I would say is that when end users build a relationship with direct manufacturers, those who build the products or sell the products, they can often get lower pricing than they can get on Amazon, Amazon or Chewy, or Wayfair will take 30% of your profits, or of your sales, sorry for marketing and delivery of that product. Whereas you can offer a lot of those savings directly to your customers for sales. So more often than not, I see Meowingtons, they’ll put out an email to their million customers and they will sell out of that merchandise, because the product they were selling was much lower than they could get it for on places like Amazon. So end users can actually get lower pricing directly through the micro brand. The last thing I will say, and probably the most important thing I will say about launching your own eCommerce business is that you have to have unique products. Now paw.com has developed a number of unique dog beds, waterproof blankets. We’ve just invented the first memory foam car seats for dogs and we’ve got a new mist and we’ve we’re constantly innovating at paw.com in building newer and better products that are not commonly available on places like Amazon. Now we’ll talk a little bit more about Amazon and how we do work with amazon at paw.com. But for now, for the most part, they are unique and different and you can only buy them through paw.com. Meowingtons another example where they have some of the best cat trees you’ve ever seen in your life and they’ve been developing them for years. They’re beautiful cat trees and there’s something that’s only available on Meowingtons and the service involved and obviously they have the content, they talk about cat trees and what makes a great cat tree. But fundamentally, if you do not have the best product in your space, the most innovative product in your space, it’s going to be hard to compete. So the first thing, most important thing is, you have to have a great product at Shopify, at contents, direct connections with your customers through email, Facebook, Instagram, a great domain name and you’ve got a formula for success.

Norman  24:32  

Very good. Gotta agree and what I got to talk about just for a second is Meowingtons. Let’s go back to that for a sec. So you guys won’t believe this. But Meowingtons is the number one download for an emoji.

Colin 24:50  

Yeah, it was like 2 Billion.

Norman  24:53  

2.2 Billion downloads for Milton the cat. You know Milton, even if you don’t know the name, you’ve seen Milton, he’s everywhere and this idea that came up, that you built this content around this daily drawing and having an animation person or a cartoon animator, as part of the full time staff was genius. Because people, 1 million legit followers, imagine what that can do for your company. A lot of times, you want to just throw it up on Amazon, and you want to just grab sales. Well, you’re only grabbing a small portion of what could be. If you think outside the box and do some other things. Man, you can double, triple, quadruple, 10 times your sales and also we’re going to get to this in a second going off of Amazon. I know a lot of people don’t necessarily want to go off of Amazon, it’s a little scary to some, some people say never do it and we’re gonna dive into that in a second. However, before we get into that, does anybody have any questions Kels?

Colin 26:07  

Well, we had one there, about how do we get people to come to the store?

Kelsey 26:12  

Yeah. So this is from Radd. How do you get customers to Shopify and he continues, we have Shopify for the past six months and no sales.

Colin 26:22  

Yeah, and I think, there are sort of the long tail ways, the hard ways, the slow ways to lower cost ways, it doesn’t cost a lot, whatever your product or service is, just build content around that. But what’s going to happen when you first put your content out, it’s really not going to have a huge impact and slowly, you build up that Facebook group and that’s absolutely important to be able to build up your community and you can’t do it right out of the box by getting them over to your site and offering them the free content, and then trying to sell them something right away. It takes some time to build up that loyalty. Even with the cartoon, I think we did about six months of cartoons before we finally put an advertisement at the bottom of the cartoon. There are ways of generating traffic to your eCommerce site where you can pay and accelerate building that community or even having individuals buy your products directly. Some of the most successful ones that we’ve had at our companies have been vehicles like Facebook, using Facebook advertising, because you have a direct understanding of how much it costs to acquire that customer. We do Google AdWords, we do Pinterest, Instagram. We are looking at experimenting with other methods of advertising. This can be very expensive and I think the lesson I learned there on this particular area is to really understand your cost of acquisition on a daily basis and don’t look at the end of the month, look at it on a daily basis. It’s something that you’ve got to track very, very closely if you have a great product and even if you can’t afford to do the advertising. You should be at least trying to experiment with different channels. If you’ve got a great product, and you can sell that product through advertising channels, and your only impediment now is just funding this supply, then it’s easier to get investors and to make that case to get investors so you can scale it.

Norman  28:33  

So Colin, I’ve also seen Paw to other things that they do great. They reuse their list. I get emails. I bought Paw products. I get emails on a regular basis about new products coming out. So it’s so easy to have a sale of an already existing customer than trying to acquire a new one and you do it great. The other part I was talking to Dave, he’s the president of Paw, right? 

Colin 29:12

That’s correct.

Norman 29:14

So Dave was on the podcast a little while ago and we talked about this but influencers. You guys use the power of influencers to also help drive sales. So you have a lot of social proof. So by between Facebook ads, reusing an email list that very little eCom sellers and Amazon sellers use, especially at the beginning and intermediate seller stage and then you’ve got the influencers. Man, you can just get so much traction where you would have to just spend so much money on Facebook ads or whatever type of ads that you want.

Colin 29:53  

Yeah, and one of the challenges is it’s a moving target. A friend of mine, Joe Mark, just sold Boxy Charm for a half billion dollars by the way, another great micro brand. We’ll talk a little bit about that hopefully, when we talk about subscription, the concept of subscription eCommerce. But one thing he told me was that the influencer space is what built their company, by the way. Absolutely built the company, the Kardashians, all that kind of stuff they’re working with, he did a phenomenal job. But, I was talking to him last week, and he mentioned that, but it’s getting more and more expensive and that’s what every advertising channel does, it gets more and more and more expensive. So even though you lock down your strategy, and you’re starting to generate business from all these ad channels, you always need to be looking or testing other avenues. Avenues, like maybe next door, if you want to be local, even the next door application, or maybe even going backwards and testing out radio and television, depending on your product and your reach in your area.

Norman  30:58  

Digital ads.

Colin 30:59  

Yeah, probably the best environment is when you catch a rising social media network where the traffic, the larger advertisers, the big corporations, they’re advertising what works. Remember, they don’t like to take risks, right? So they’re advertising what works, what has worked, and what will continue to work. They believe on an ongoing basis, even if the profits almost go to zero profit. But there are other channels that are growing, where if you can find those channels and grab onto them, then you can benefit from the low costs of advertising in the early years.

Norman  31:38  

Okay. Kelsey, I see a few more questions coming in. Yeah. Oh, and Victor had a question or a statement.

Kelsey 31:45  

That was a statement. Let me go back here. So FYI, extremely popular cybersecurity. Malwarebytes has recently launched a browser guard feature that is aggressively flagging non standard tlds. People clicking on our .club URLs are getting a super scary looking warning.

Colin 32:04  

Any new domain extension, there are challenges in adoption and .club actually, ironically, has one of the lowest rates of fraud, or spam use of any of the new domain extensions, we sell .club on GoDaddy. Just early on, there are always going to be challenges with new domain extensions, you can be seen that with .co, the way that .co came into the marketplace. The good news is that for the most part, that’s been getting a lot better over the years and .club now is actually one of if not the most popular new domain extensions in the marketplace for new businesses and membership concepts and eCommerce sets.

Norman  32:53  

Very good. Kelsey has a bunch of questions, wasn’t there?

Kelsey 32:56  

Yep. So from Andrew, thoughts on Clickfunnels?

Colin 33:03  

Yeah, I don’t have a lot of experience. That’s just not an area where I spent time on. I don’t know Nrom if you wanted to talk about that.

Norman 33:10  

We have and we do use Clickfunnels. It’s a great application for Oh, here comes some coffee. It’s a great application. It’s like anything, you have to use it to its full potential. If you go and you just like an Excel spreadsheet, you only learn how to add or just hit the AutoSum button, then you’re not using it to its full potential. I’ve seen people that just killed it with ClickFunnels, or similar products, and they know what they’re doing. They just know what they’re doing and that’s the same with Facebook ads, lookalike audiences, building up your audiences in split testing, you just have to know and get to become an expert in it. So ClickFunnels’ 100% is great for any eCommerce site.

Kelsey 34:07  

This is from Ella. Colin, which is the best way to increase my email subscriber list organically?

Colin 34:14  

Boy, I’m really being challenged. I think it’s actually coming back to content. I know, in Shopify, there’s an app that allows you to spin a wheel and enter your email address. I’ve seen our companies do that a few times. I think they turn it on a few times per year, like early in November to try to build up their email base, so they’re ready for Black Friday. But I’m not certain how effective those methods are and how they come across a little cheesy.

Norman  34:48  

Yeah, they can. I agree, but they’re effective. Like, we have the Wheel of Kelsey on here. It’s very effective. But the other thing about acquiring organic emails, simple things like use chatbots, drive people over to a chatbot and try to get their email, there could be a dozen different ways of doing that. I know Paul Baron is going to be coming on shortly. He’s also been on before talking about this. But that’s such an easy process. Drive people from Facebook over to your Shopify store, and have a small added value product there for their email address. There’s so many different things that you can do. So anyways, I hope that helps you out. There were three options there.

Kelsey 35:43  

From Andrew, I think we’ve touched on this multiple times on different podcasts. But if there’s anything that you would like to add. I have products that really suit themselves to influencers, what’s the best way to find influencers?

Colin 35:57  

Again, I’m not an expert in this area. Actually, that would be a great question, if you can save that one when you do get Joe Martin on because problem that’s never been somebody in the internet who succeeded more with influencers than Joe Martin and that’s the company Boxy Charm, just merged with Ipsy and I think their thoughts are now to take that public. So it’s a huge story and built on influencers. What I find interesting is that some companies are built using influencers, some are built using Facebook ads, some are built focusing on Amazon, some are doing the online shopping channels. It’s fascinating to see, but if you can somehow crack the code of doing all of them well, you could probably accelerate growth in many of these companies and I think we’re probably about a third of the way there at paw.com and Meowingtons. But there’s a lot more opportunity by listening to podcasts like this, and learning different channels that if you could somehow crack all of them, it would just be phenomenal growth.

Norman  37:02  

Right and I think we should point out to people too, that you are high level, you have the vision, you’re the entrepreneur, and you have people that are doing these things, building the company like Dave, he’s an expert in building influencers, or Facebook ads or getting the answers. So he answers to you, but all you have to do is direct, right?

Colin 37:28  

That is correct Norm. My job is to sit on a beach and sip pina coladas.

Norman  37:34  

Really?

Colin 37:36  

Yeah. I do get involved in a number of companies. We do a lot of quarterly strategic planning sessions, really try to understand and help these companies with all of their challenges and also find ways to help them grow and expand profitably. We run an incubator, ironically called startups.club and we have a number of companies in the incubator that we’re working with today and launching.

Norman  38:05  

Right. Okay, any other questions, Kels?

Kelsey. 38:10  

Yeah. I will be launching my first product in about three weeks on Amazon FBA. Should I consider Shopify also at launch?

Colin 38:20  

Absolutely, the cost of launching, I mean, I sound like I work for Shopify, I don’t, no connection. The costs of launching are so low and if you exclusively go through Amazon, you’re not building a relationship with those customers. It’s very difficult. I know there are some methods that some people have tried to crack where you can build up a user base directly or an email list directly, but you’re really not building much of a relationship at Amazon. I’m not saying that Amazon, there isn’t a strategy for that. I call it the King of the Hill strategy. You basically have to be the leader on Amazon in a particular product category, and you can dominate or do very well sales on Amazon. I think that’s part of the equation. paw.com, we do go on Amazon. We sell products there, but we only sell a small subset of the products that you can get on paw.com. If you remember what I said earlier in the podcast, the products have to be unique and different to be able to sell separately. We do go into Amazon to try to attract more customers with the hope that they’ll buy a product there then go to paw.com next and check all of the other products and services that we have that are very unique that are not available on Amazon.

Norman  39:43  

Okay, was that the last question?

Kelsey 39:47  

That’s it for now.

Norman  39:48  

Perfect. Let’s get into subscription boxes. So first of all, in case people don’t know, what’s this subscription box and what are the benefits?

Colin 40:01  

Yeah, I don’t just think about subscription boxes when I think of subscription services.

Norman  40:06  

soap.club is a subscription service.

Colin 40:09  

That’s correct. I mean, there might be some digital services, you might come up with a greeting card subscription service. There are digital applications here for subscription services as well. It’s interesting to see the rise of subscription services, companies like Bark Box, and Ipsy. BarkBox was a competitor to Birchbox and what they did different, remember unique and different, they keep coming back to that. Birchbox had samples that they sent to their customers. Boxy Charm had full products that you’d buy at a store, but he was able to buy them at wholesale rates, not the wholesale costs that you’d get a retailer would pay, but the cost of manufacturing those products, because they were still promoting the products of their suppliers. So that was very interesting to see that model and how that worked. At even club again, it lends itself very well to subscription services, companies, like firstleaf.club, is been a popular wine club that you can buy wine at and the advantage of a club obviously, is that club services or membership per box services, subscription services, all of them, the advantage is that you get recurring revenue. The disadvantage is that your cost of acquisition can be higher than your first month’s recurring revenue or first quarterly recurring revenue. I do have some stats that I asked my staff to research for me and I would like to read them off to you Norm. This came up earlier and this applies, I think, to all eCommerce sites, but the likelihood of selling more products to an existing customer is 60 to 70% compared to five to 20% likelihood of closing a deal with a new prospect. The global subscription commerce economy has a compound annual growth rate of 17.33% and that’s from Subta, the subscription summit. Another one is 75% of direct to consumer eCommerce organizations will offer subscription commerce business models by 2023. So even if you have listeners who only sell a single product, like paw.com, they should consider or they are considering how do we create a subscription box or a subscription service? They’re saying that 75% of eCommerce retailers will consider doing that by 2023.

Norman  42:52  

Wow, we would never guessed that. All right, let’s see. It doesn’t look like there’s anything else. All right. So Colin, let’s talk about the launch of a different. So cigar.club, for example, names.club, let’s talk a little bit about that.

Colin 43:17  

Yeah, and that’s an interesting one. So Norm and I have been talking about doing something for a while. I know he did soap.club and we’ve seen a number of successful eCommerce businesses launching the incubator here. So we thought of an idea called cigar.club and so we’re partnering on that idea right now and really, I think the first thing that comes to mind Norm is that I don’t smoke cigars and you do, and you’ve a passion for cigars. You just truly love them and it’s something that you understand and I would say anybody considering getting into any business, if you don’t have that passion or love, it’s going to be hard to launch it. Developing content for a company like cigar.club. If you’ve got the passion, it can flow very easily and you also understand the space better than most. If you’re walking in and I asked you Norm, can you launch a jewelry company? It’d be like, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to look for, what happened, what’s good, what’s trendy, what’s not, that’s the issue there. But if you have a passion like cigars, I’m thinking Hey Norm, why don’t we think about partnering on that? So the interesting question, what would it take to launch something like that and how would we do it? We would obviously set up a Shopify store. I can’t imagine we would not do that if we had products but what would make us unique and different and I think we need to brainstorm some of those ideas as well.

Norman  44:57  

One of the things that we’ve talked about is not to sell anything right off the bat and it’s funny and I think it’s important because it has to do with the rise of the micro brands. We’re taking cigars, we’re not selling cigars right off the bat, what are we gonna do Colin? It’s all content, it’s content, content, more content. We’re going to launch a podcast, cigar corner and that’s coming up very soon people. But anyways, I love cigars, everybody knows that. Just like Colin says I’m passionate about it, I know a ton of people that love cigars, and by that, I think it’s going to grow. So just use that for your own product. Let’s say that you’re into beauty products, it’s the exact same thing. You don’t have to just promote, promote, promote, promote. You launch the product, you can start selling on Amazon, if you want. Build a website, build a good website and we know who our audience is. We know the demographics, we’ve done the research and now it’s just building up the content to grab people’s attention so that they’ll come to the site. So we are going to keep you informed on that. That should be launching actually very soon, by the way and then if you take a look at another one. So what was really important in this podcast is we could talk about Amazon all day long, we could talk about just eCom. But I wanted to talk about the brand, names.club. Okay, there’s something you can go to names.club, you launched names.club and I thought it was a great idea. People can go to names.club, they can type in cigar, okay, cigar and it would come up with is it available. It could be a .club, it could be a .store, it could be a .co. There’s a group of extensions and you can own a premium domain to launch the brand, which we did with cigar. It’s going to be easy. Google is going to love us because it’s a cigar. We bought a premium domain through names.club. You can do the exact same thing but here’s the difference. You don’t have to pay everything upfront, if you find a $5,000 name a 25 and I’m not getting anything for this. So I’m not getting an affiliate at all, for talking about this. This is just a nugget that you can go out and do. Go check it out and you can see that if you wanted something like beauty, or whatever it is, you got a 16 month payment plan that Oh, Adobe is updating. Okay. You got a 16 month payment plan that you can use. Am I still there?

Colin 47:59  

Yeah, you’re here.

Norman  48:00  

Okay and if you don’t want it, let’s say it sucks and it fails in three months. Well, guess what? You don’t lose anything, it’s just the payments that you put into it. You have 60 months to pay it off, if you love it, and you decide to sell the company with this premium domain, guess what the valuations goes through the roof. So it’s just something to take a look at. I don’t know if you want to talk anything more about names.club, but I thought it was good to bring up.

Colin 48:28  

I’ll add Norm is that a lot of people say Well, why not get the .com like you have the paw.com  why don’t we use paw.club. Well actually, we are using paw.club. It’s a project that we’re working on internally to launch. We talked about membership services, we’re working on something with paw.club, we actually bought paw.ca as well, just to make sure we had it. But to be quite frank paw.com was probably about 100 times more expensive than the paw.club and you can actually get good domain names with good SEO value on some of the new domain extensions names.club, wesell.club, wesell.store, wesell.shop. We focus on the new domain extensions at names.club and if you do have a .com, it can actually complement that so as the example with Meowingtons, we have Milton the cat club, we wanted to create a sort of a separate brand for the comic strip and so we did that we use that domain extension. So more often than not, you can find something that complements the .com that can support you. If you buy a .com and it is misspelled.com, which has been a popular trend over the last 10 to 15 years, since they came out with I think it was that flicker spelled F l k r or whatever, we started to see the trend of misspelled.com. It can actually be good from a legal perspective to defend the name. But one of the challenges you have is you don’t get a lot of SEO benefit from that domain and domains do lead to good SEO benefit. Another good one out there is .online that can also provide you with some good SEO benefit and especially for content if, as you said, we talked about cigar.club and launching cigar.club, what is it that we talked about today that we could apply to launch cigar.club, and you’re right, the first was build content, get a good domain name and from there, once we built up a relationship get up to maybe 10,000 customers, then we can add on a Shopify site with a unique offering that you can buy these cigars. Today I was thinking about that Norm is, what would make it unique in that you can go to a local store and buy cigars, but I think what can make it unique is really applying or educating the customers as to what would be the best product for them and then also offering them what we call you UMOD and this is something that paw.com applies. Now what’s a UMOD? I know we phrased it, so it’s not something you can get out of the dictionary or Google. But it’s probably one of the most effective things that retailers can do today and it’s unexpected moment of delight. Okay, the most important word of that is unexpected. So if you order a product and something else comes with that product, which gives the customer an unexpected moments of delight, you’ve now won that customer, that customer will be extremely loyal to you and they will talk about it, how many people are going to talk about issues or they’ve had with the company, they generally complain about companies, but not as many people will talk about their positive experience with a company. There is a hotel in LA, I can’t remember the name of it. I remember the story. But there’s a gentleman who walks out in this hotel into the pool deck and he’s in a suit and he hands out popsicles and everybody talks about this and isn’t even the nicest hotel, but it’s become one of the top rated hotels. I think it is the top rated Hotel in Los Angeles. Unexpected moments of delight.

Norman  52:05  

Very good. Very good. I just saw something from Colin here. Yeah, what’s the name of the website? It’s names.club.

Colin 52:15  

www.names.club.

Norman  52:18  

All right. Kelsey has a couple other questions here. Oh, Victor, the Automatic Customer by John Warrillow is a good read on this topic.

Kelsey 52:28  

Okay, so from Manny, do you see a saturation of micro niche businesses in the near future and continues if one comes up with the idea to combine micro bands into a niche? So do you see any saturation happening?

Colin 52:43  

I think we’re in a very exciting time in history. I’ll tell you why. We’re seeing the brick and mortar stores implode. Right? So if you were asking me two years ago, if you should start a micro brand and brick and mortar, I’d be saying you gotta have a Lululemon concept. I mean, there are a few that succeed. Let’s be honest, there’s not many at this stage, or a year or two ago, that could really penetrate the retail marketplace. It’s tough. Online eCommerce has never been a better time to launch your online eCommerce business. The playing field has been leveled. How can you compete against Amazon? The fact of the matter is, you now have an application that you can launch for under 100 bucks with Shopify. You can get a logistics provider that can give you similar delivery times and costs that Amazon has. You can outsource to manufacturers in the US or in China or elsewhere to get these products developed. It doesn’t require you staffing up hundreds of people. So it’s never been easier to do it and what we have is a paradigm shift, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. The pandemic, I don’t think in itself is a paradigm shift. Although we are seeing some elements of a shift of the way that people that businesses travel or consumers shop. It’s really an accelerant to other trends that had existed in the marketplace prior to the pandemic. But we’re seeing the implosion of brick and mortar and the explosion of the rise of micro brands online. Now, why is it that Blockbuster didn’t own that market and Netflix did? It was a new company. Why is it that Pier 1 went down and Wayfair rose, and that has a lot to do with larger corporations and innovation and I tried to talk a little bit about that today. But the fact of the matter is, is entrepreneurs out there who can launch these businesses and serve the customers better than the micro brands can. You can provide better information. We do it at Meowingtons, we do it at Paw. You can provide better customer experiences than they will get directly by going to Amazon.

Norman  55:11  

Very good. Alright, any other question?

Kelsey 55:17  

There’s one last question here. Do you have any top guerilla marketing techniques for a small business on a little budget?

Colin 55:29  

Guerilla marketing techniques, Yes I do and there’s a few of them that come to mind. One of them is always wear a T-shirt. I wear one shirt every day, startups.club. I’m out at the restaurant. I’m in the elevator. Somebody asked me what startups.club? Well, it’s actually an incubator in Fort Lauderdale. Well, how much did it cost me? I will actually save money because I’m not buying Polo Club shirts. Right? So actually, that’s just one small thing and another one is, a way to work the trade shows. My partners and I have done this all the time, as we always sit in the front row, and the speaker more often with our shirts on by the way, more often than not, they’ll call our name out. That’s a good business to business play if you’re in a trade show related to that. Business to consumer, it’s a little bit of a different thing. I think, just live your passion. Ultimately, if you’re going for a b2c play, build the content, build a community first. It doesn’t cost you a lot to do that and if it’s your passion, you’re gonna love it, and then apply the products on afterwards, and start to monetize that community. I think that’s probably the biggest thing you can do, if you have little to no budget, but also, don’t be afraid when you have something, and you have some traction to get some financing out there or get some investors into your company, friends and family. Angel investors go to the competitions. A lot of people have great ideas, and they hold them back their whole life and they don’t like to share them, they’re nervous that they know others will find out and they’ll take it and run with it. The fact of the matter is, that rarely happens. Unless you’re you’re starting to get really big and you launch an Amazon and we know there are companies like Amazon that will offer obviously duplicate, but  what the fact of the matter is, that’s going to happen anyway, if you get big, but when you’re small, share your ideas with your friends and family, work on those ideas, and then launch those ideas. Don’t be afraid of launching, just get it out there.

Kelsey 57:40  

From Victor, do you have an opinion whether a registered trademark holder can legitimately take over another party’s domain?

Colin 57:47  

Yes, absolutely. That’s something called a UDRP. If you own a trademark on a particular name, you can win that trademark through a process called UDRP. It’s about $5,000. I would say that it’s very difficult to win over names that are considered to be generic and if that name is not using or delivering the services or selling the products of the trademark holder, then it’s very difficult for that trademark holder to take over that name. So if somebody owns the name Paw, with respect to, they call their car The Paw. That’s unrelated to the business that we’re in today and they would have a very difficult time taking the domain paw.com. That’s one of the advantages of getting a generic domain name, you have a stronger ability to retain that domain name in the marketplace because it’s more difficult for trademark holders to take from you. You have to be careful, if you’re in the United States, and you’re going to launch or sell products in the United States, go to uspto.gov. You don’t need to call your lawyer. It’s free. It takes 10 seconds and type in the name you’re thinking of using and see who’s using that name.

Norman  59:11  

Just on that note, I found out the hard way that if it’s very generic, and you go on Amazon, it’s hard to register for Brand Registry if you can’t get that trademark on a generic name. So just kind of keep that in mind.

Colin 59:29  

So there’s workarounds and that’s a great one. So paw.com, obviously it’s very difficult to get the name trademarked for Paw, we are working on it but that could take five to 10 years. There’s some unique standards that you have to have around notability in order to get generics approved. But we launched Paw brands as our main company and we were able to obtain the trademark for Paw brands and that’s the name we use on Amazon.

Norman  59:55  

Very good. It looks like Victor’s got a follow up question here.

Kelsey 1:00:00  

Does the TLD strength matter?

Colin 1:00:02  

Google came out with an article on this and said that it does not, that there’s no advantage or disadvantage to using a .com versus a .online or a .shop or .club. The only advantage is whether or not Google can recognize the domain name, and the words that are within a domain name. So for example, if I own dog.com, from a Google SEO perspective, they would treat it similar to a dog.club. That being said, from a consumer perspective, today, .com is the king in the standard, and if you can get a generic .com and invest in it, and by that name, that’s a solid strategy. It really depends on the type of business. When my wife and I launched a school here in Fort Lauderdale, we chose a .org over at .com. If you’re looking at membership services, .clubs are relatively new, we believe .club will become the leader in providing subscription boxes and services on a membership basis as well, and it also does mean luxury, quality exclusivity, it does mean something different. That being said, if you can get the .com, again, in some cases, we’re talking about a three letter word .com well over a million dollars to acquire. But if you’re able to get a .com, that’s a solid safe strategy, I would recommend doing that. You can also complement other domain names like a .shop or a .online to try to help build out your SEO. So if you do launch a domain, or have a business and it’s really not as an actual English word, it’s something different like Flkr, Fl k r, you can launch photos.club as a way of generating your SEO and building up traffic from SEO that you would direct over to your misspelled, we’ll call it a misspelled.com, which is not a bad strategy as well. As Norm said, it’s easier to get your trademark and that helps you a little bit on Amazon. So it’s a trade off.

Norman  1:02:14  

All right, it looks like Marina has a question, Kels.

Kelsey 1:02:17  

This will be our last question. This is where at the hour mark here. I have customers reaching me on my website with questions but completing the purchase on Amazon, I have the same prices and free shipping. Any advice on how to convert them on my site?

Colin 1:02:33  

So I’m not certain I understand the question. Are you saying that even though you offer the same products and services on your sites, that they’re still buying them on Amazon? I think that’s what I think that’s it, and I do the same. When I see a product advertised on Facebook or elsewhere, I jump to Amazon, I search Amazon and by the way, paw.cm was not on Amazon, two, three years ago, and people would search. We would advertise on Facebook, they literally see the ad they jump over to Amazon and a competitor would sell them a product. So Amazon is part of the equation. I’m not preaching that it is a huge part of the methods of selling as well. I do think that if you offer lower pricing that obviously can make an impact. You can’t do it all the time. But you can have short term sales on your site. Norm do you have any other thoughts around this one?

Norman  1:03:29  

Yeah. So some of the ways that we do it, we’ll offer an added value. So you come on to the site, you see something that is 16 ounce, and you give Well, I use this before on on this podcast, you give shampoo, they can go buy it on Amazon, but they don’t get the small sample bottle of conditioner, or give them something if it only comes in green and black on Amazon, offer them red. So there are different ways, I think just most humans right now want to go to Amazon for security. But when you get and by the way, so once they buy the product on Amazon, you can lure them back over to your website for a product offering another additional 10% off or a product that’s not on Amazon, to give them the confidence in your brand. So everything is consistency by the way, too. So when they look at your product listing, and they trust your brand, and they buy it, when they go to your website, it’s got to be consistent. It’s got to look good, it’s got to look trustworthy. This is where content comes into. If people are looking for keywords through Google and they see all these articles or press releases or whatever it is, plus your social media is up to par they’re gonna build up trust, which is going to equal sales. But I always like to add some different value, just things that may not be associated or on Amazon and they have to buy it there if they want. So there’s a couple of options.

Colin 1:05:14  

Yeah, in the case of paw.com, we take our best sellers, and we put them on Amazon. Again, we have unique and different products that are exciting that you can go to directly at paw.com that you can’t get an Amazon. Like you talked about the color red or something like that, we have a lot of different products. Like you said Norm, we put in a flyer in every box that goes out that talks about post us on Instagram, but also come over and get a special code or discount on your next door at paw.com. So you can almost think of Amazon like the Trojan horse, you send the horse in, everybody knows that story where they sent the wooden horse in, and all the soldiers right side, and they popped out of the horse and whatnot. So think of Amazon, in that respect, it’s a channel of marketing, they’re obviously running their company and maximize their profit. We have to be careful of them duplicating your products, or others duplicating your products. But like I say when you get big enough, it doesn’t matter anymore, you’re going to duplicate anyway, even if you’re not on Amazon. So I think it’s part of this part of the strategy, it’s there to stay and we’re happy when we do get an order, because we’re trying to convert that order, as Norm says, to a long standing customer at our website paw.com.

Norman  1:06:24  

Yep and I agree, Victor, it is a tough wall to climb. But if you can get people to trust your brand, that might not be the first order, it might be the second or even the third order. But ideally, if you can get them converted over to you and to trust you, then you’ve got a better chance of well, all of a sudden, you’re making an extra 20 points too, because you’ve got a customer who already likes your product. So Colin, it’s the end, man this flew by. I could have talked to you for another couple hours. There’s something I saw you talk once, I’ve seen you talk a bunch, but you have this process, this PDF, and I’d really like to share it with the group and it’s basically about how to grow and scale and sell your business. It’s really a clear cut PDF that you mean, this could be a whole other podcast. But if we could share this, would that be okay?

Colin 1:07:29  

Absolutely and I’ll send it over to you Norm. We talked a lot today about how to make an eCommerce business successful. But fundamentally, going through the seven or eight companies that I have co-founded in the last 20, 25 years, I’ve learned those patterns. We talked about that paradigm shift and learning when there is a paradigm shift to serve that. Well, what I’ve also learned is that to start a company, scale a company, exit a company or repeat that process, that you really need to think of your company in terms of people, money, story and systems. Okay, so let me slow down here. If you do not have the right people running your companies, it’s not going to succeed. Okay? If you do not have enough money to launch that company, it’s not going to succeed. If you do not have the right story, if it’s not a compelling product, unique, different, or if it’s not something, it’s a compelling differentiator in the marketplace, it’s not going to succeed and if you do not have the right systems, it will implode over time. The vast majority of entrepreneurs or in our country in the world, the vast majority are people who run small businesses who never get beyond the phase of a small business. It’s not as hard as you think to take a small business and scale that business as long as you have the right people, the money and the story and systems in place. 

Norman 1:08:59  

Right. Crossing the Chasm.

Colin 1:09:01  

Absolutely.

Norman  1:09:03  

All right. So we will post and take a look at it. It’s fantastic. I know Colin talks about this system or this PDF quite a bit. I love it, and we’ll be posting it. So I think there is one last question then we’ll close off the questions. 

Kelsey 1:09:23  

Which payment solutions you’re using to build trust to Amazon payments help with this on the site or the opposite?

Colin 1:09:32  

Again, this is sort of an operational question but I will go on a high level that the more easier it is for a customer to buy your product, the better. We’ve just learned about a new one from PayPal. So a firm I think we’ve been using a firm where they break the payments out over four months and we’ve just learned of a new one that PayPal has which is included in the fee. So I think we were paying like 6% for a firm and now we’re not going to pay anything for the monthly payments that are broken out if we use Paypal’s eCommerce, their credit card billing system. This is something very new. I don’t have a lot of information about it Norm. It’s something you might want to follow up on and learn about. But, I think you could do a whole show on the different payment methods from your eCommerce site. But I do like having, the more the better. But we have to watch our margins when we get into some of the companies like a firm where they break it out over four months and take 6%.

Norman  1:10:39  

Okay, sir. Well, I think that’s it.

Colin 1:10:42  

Well, thank you Norm. It was a lot of fun. I love talking about entrepreneurship, domain names, all this stuff and I think what you’ve got here with this podcast is something very special and I can see it’s growing very, very quickly and I think it’s an inspiring way. It’s inspired me, but it’s an inspiring way to help other entrepreneurs as well.

Norman  1:11:02  

Well, thank you, sir. Alright. Well, you’re off the hook. Until next time, we’ll have you back. Hopefully, we can have you back really soon and we’ll see you virtually smoking a cigar somewhere. 

Colin 1:11:16

Sounds good.

Norman 1:11:18

Alright. See you later Col.

Norman  1:11:19  

All right, everybody. So I told you, it’d be informative. So my buddy, Colin Campbell, if you want to learn more about him and what he’s been doing, just check them out on the internet. He’s got some incredible stuff to share and like I said, if you want to check out this premium domain, I got nothing. It’s not an affiliate site. Just go to names.club, and check it out. It’s well worth it. Alright, everybody. So Marina, Andrew, Daniel, thank you so much. Everybody else that’s on here that I’m missing. Really appreciate you tuning in today and again, if you have any follow up questions, just let us know and we’ll make sure that we send them over to Colin. So Kels, where are you sir?

Kelsey 1:12:07  

Hello, hello. Yep, so if you guys haven’t yet, we do have our Facebook group. It is the Beard Nation, you can find it at Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. Right now today, we have our weekly, moronic Monday. So it’s your opportunity to post any questions you have. It could be as simple as What does FBA stand for? What is Google? Or you can go more complex, but we just want to open up the floor to you guys if you have any questions and it’s not just for Norm, it’s for everyone to answer. So if you are an expert in a certain topic, go ahead and answer away and if you missed the episode today, if you’re just catching the tail end of it, you can find all of the information, all the videos, all the highlights on our YouTube channel Norman Farrar. You can search Lunch with Norm and you’ll be able to find it and I think that’s it.

Norman  1:13:08  

Well, Wednesday. We have Brenda’s partner. Right? Josh Marsden

Kelsey 1:13:15  

Yes.

Norman  1:13:16  

Yes and so he’s gonna be on. He is the CVO of Acceleration and he’s going to be talking about a bunch of different things, specifically about his ARM5 Formula. So you gotta stay tuned. Look, I’ve been trying to get Josh on forever and believe me, it’s gonna be a fantastic podcast. So join us on Wednesday at noon, Eastern Central Time and by the way, you can join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time. I just mentioned central time again. Oh my god. Alright. Thanks, everybody and we’ll see you next week. What are you saying Kels?

Kelsey 1:14:03  

Just to answer this question, what was the domain name? It was names.club. So www.names.club. Alright now.

Norman  1:14:14  

Now, are you gonna allow me to finish?

Kelsey 1:14:17  

The floor is yours. 

Norman  1:14:18  

Well thank you, sir. All right. Thanks for joining everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day.