Transcription
This is not your average get-rich-fast video that you see on YouTube. I'm not like those other gurus; as a matter of fact, if you know anything about me, you know I'm not a guru at all. Got me [ __ ] up. Hey, I'm right back on they ass, yo. They don't make me mad. I've been keeping calm, constantly keep making cash, y. I've been getting bag after bag after bag, y [ __ ] [ __ ] cat, straight C, yeah baby, I'm a [ __ ] and my daddy was a [ __ ] before the personal brand, before the content. I was heads down in a dark room building my brand on Amazon as a 22-year-old kid. I didn't quite appreciate that I had found a gold rush opportunity—the ability to spend a dollar on the internet and make five. And so my only question was, how many dollars can I potentially spend before my life changes forever? Ultimately, it did. This is how you go from zero to multiple eight figures. For me, it was $30 million plus. That's without a personal brand, that's without a fancy degree, and that's without waiting 5 plus years. See, the internet really is the land of get-rich-quick. Truly, your life can change in 6 months to a year. That's something I'm seeing time and time again. Today, I want to give you the keys to the game, absolutely free. This is a long video; I am packing in as much strategic, real value as humanly possible.
Now you might say, Rob, why on God's green earth would you be doing that for us? Listen, as important as it was for me to have actually done the thing that I'm talking about, it's more important that I am doing it now. Okay, they used to say, if you can't do, you teach, but in the modern world, if you are not doing, then you should never teach. I'm building a brand portfolio again. We are doing over $300,000 per day in Revenue at the time of shooting this. Okay, and the acceleration over the last 24 months because of this current gold rush opportunity is unlike anything you will probably ever see again in your life. And the truth is that it is easier than ever with TikTok Shop, artificial intelligence, and some of the other levers that I'll show you in this video. I am making this type of content because I've made seven investments this year—non-stop Ventures. I am finding the next generation of consumer Brands, backing them with my resources, and ultimately trying to monopolize this entire game. So this isn't just an altruistic "Rob's a good guy" video. That being said, I love putting this stuff out there, and I love seeing you level up. Sit down, lock in. This video is designed to change your life. Let's get it.
Now I know you—you want to get rich on the internet. This—this is not your first time watching any sort of make-money-online video ever. And the truth is, I feel for you because I see the world out there with all of these people mixing this combination of strange sales tactics with motivation with why their idea is the best, and they leave you confused without understanding the basic rules to the game. As I progress through this video, I'm going to teach you about Wi-Fi wealth—which is real money on the internet—but before we get that—get to that point, I want to just talk about the existing landscape of what's out there right now. A lot of these online businesses that have been pitched over the last couple years are what I like to call graveyard businesses because they lead absolutely nowhere. Now if you get emotional watching this, I'm sorry. Come back in a year because you will have broken up with your Guru at that point. Okay, you will come back later and finish this video, so—so bookmark it. You can leave now, but bookmark it. Something like SMMA—this broad term for social media marketing agency—and it was really appealing when social media first started because it's like, hey, every business needs social media, right? Every business needs social media. Now the truth is, most of these side hustles just tend to create more work for you. You're literally replacing your 9-to-5 with a job where you have to work harder and, in cases like SMMA, make less. Okay, like you—you maybe could drive Uber and do better than you would SMMA. The basic idea here is that you are going to go out and you're going to find like local businesses and run their social media for them. Now you think about that—like it sounds good, but what's the actual upside? What's the actual return? What actual value are you delivering to the business? The point of business is to make money, and so you, as an SMMA agency, if you are good enough to make that business more money, then why aren't you doing that business? Why aren't you running your own business? Right? Like the economics of SMMA have always been relatively strange, and the reality is you're probably more focused on actually getting clients because that's where you make money than you are the actual sauce—meaning actual value—that you're going to deliver for the client—some edge, some understanding of social media that makes you better than literally everybody else. Okay, and if you lack those pieces, then there's no point in doing this. There are so many better opportunities in general because you're not going to exit an SMMA agency; you're not going to build it out to a level of like lifestyle-changing, permanent cash flow. It's just a losing [ __ ] game, period. I'm sorry.
Sales. Everyone on the internet nowadays is talking about high-ticket sales is because there's all these info programs that are being sold, and with that comes the opportunity to make commission. Okay, sales skills are good; I'm not here to [ __ ] on any of the potential skills that come with these Ventures, but again, when you're talking Wi-Fi wealth—wealth, not income, not get-rich wealth—the type of thing that's going to set you free permanently, then traditional income, which is what sales is—and trading your time for money because again that's what sales is—is not going to set you free, period. Another One Bites the Dust: Airbnb Arbitrage. This was a big one that worked for a short period of time, and a lot of people made money, and it's not completely dead now either, but I'm also going to loop this in with what I like to call Amazon FBA wholesale. Okay, and the common theme with these two businesses is the asymmetric risk doesn't make sense. Airbnb Arbitrage: the basic idea is you sign a lease in a neighborhood, and you should be able to arbitrage income by putting that property on Airbnb. So the idea is, if I rent a condo here in Miami for $11,000 a month on Airbnb, I should be able to make $1,500 a month, pocketing that extra $500. Okay, now obviously, as more people come into this, as more properties become available on Airbnb, the rate in which you're able to charge on Airbnb goes like this. Okay, so it's—it's already going like this, meanwhile you're holding the risk of the lease, so you're risking $11,000 a month to make $500, and if that starts to slide to $250, and then if you're in the red, you're eating into your savings, and all of a sudden it's a bad situation. Similar to something like Amazon FBA wholesale: you are buying a bunch of inventory from another brand. Let's say you find a deal on Nike; you buy $10,000 worth of inventory. For every unit you sell, you make 10 to 15%, so you are risking $10,000 to make $11,000. Do that math, and then what happens when you wake up to the reality—which is happening right now—that Nike is now gated and you no longer can sell their product, and now you and a thousand other wholesalers have $10,000 worth of Nike inventory that you can no longer sell? The asymmetric risk doesn't make sense. All the while, it's still not an exit or otherwise attractive business that's going to set you free. Putting both of those in the same bucket. Oh, Drop Shipping. Drop Shipping. Drop Shipping. Jordan Welch. I don't—all Sasha, all Drop Shipping—the sexiest business of the [ __ ] century. And truth be told, I'm too hard on it sometimes. Okay, I'm—I'm too hard on it. The problem with Drop Shipping as a whole is you get these like 16-year-old kids thinking they cracked the magic money code, driving a Lamborghini, saying they got rich from Drop Shipping, when in reality they got rich from selling you the course on Drop Shipping. Okay, because again, it's an attractive business idea: you have no inventory; you just have to test products, run ads, and you have no overhead. So if you can find a product that you can spend $3 on ads for and there's $10 of profit, all of a sudden you made $7 a unit. You try to scale it; it's like—it's like an attractive idea. I do know drop shippers that have done well; almost all of them are not on the internet. A couple might be. Right? I don't—I don't dig into other people's business practices, but the ones that have done well are often like super low-key. Like one of the guys, he has a huge factory in China; he's Asian, right? He—he's cracked this machine, and they—they just—they do well. To me, it's still not an attractive business model because you're putting in all this effort to build something without that long-term value, without the Enterprise Value, which I'll talk about in the next chapter. Right? People don't often sell Drop Shipping Brands. Maybe you move to a warehouse eventually; like maybe all of that comes to fruition, but I'm telling you there is a much better way—a much better way that I'll talk about in detail that I've—that I've done. And for the time being, like this idea of drop shipping would be superseded with building a real asset—the type of company I would like to invest in, the type of companies that are being scaled like crazy on TikTok right now. Something like Drop Shipping could work because of TikTok organic marketing, but that same TikTok organic marketing can be used to [ __ ]-Chad scale your own brand to multiple eight or even nine figures—or even a billion. Billions of dollars of wealth were created from the Amazon Gold Rush. I, as a young kid, regret not taking part in that, and that again is why I'm doing what I'm doing now—trying to monopolize this entire TikTok Shop system.
Last but not least: YouTuber. Oh, I'm a YouTuber. I'm trading my time for money. I'm sitting here banking on ad revenue and sponsors. It is a high-paying job if I'm one of the few people that actually cracks it, huh? It's weird seeing this dream of being a YouTuber materialized because at the end of the day, it's largely again a side hustle or not a real business, or there's no long-term strategic plan to maximize actual wealth, à la Jake Paul, Logan Paul, MrBeast. When you can combine the understanding of marketing, media, and Enterprise Value, something like this makes sense. Okay, it's much like—I think a lot about it—like hip-hop artists. 99 out of 100 of those guys are dirt broke. They got some clout; they got some awareness; they got some brand to give them the latest chain, and then 2 years later they're gone. It comes and goes; people's attention wanes. Not understanding Enterprise Value, equity, and real business is going to leave you on the treadmill of life regardless of how popular you are as a YouTuber. Okay, so all of these things you're seeing—I'm not just like [ __ ] on them coldly; I'm trying to open your mind to what it actually means to make it—to give you the proper playbook for escaping this entire game—for using the internet as a means to getting where you want to go, which is ultimately [ __ ] rich and [ __ ] free. It is all about playing the right games. The internet—it is truly beautiful. We need to take a second to appreciate that. Amazon, social media, the ability to connect with millions of people, to sell to millions of people without ever leaving your home office, without relying on automations that damn near do all of the work for you—the ability to quite literally print millions of dollars while you go work out at the gym—it's an opportunity my father never had. Okay, it's an opportunity my grandparents literally couldn't have dreamed about. But understanding all of that framework while still understanding real business and what ultimately will again set you free, like I keep talking about, is what's going to change everything. And that is why I start talking here: e-commerce is king because of Enterprise Value. Now Enterprise Value is basically what somebody is willing to pay for your business. You see a guy like Elon Musk—Elon Musk doesn't have $200 billion; something like Tesla where he's the primary shareholder is worth however much Tesla's worth now, and his shares equate to that value. On a smaller scale, I built something like the Genius Brand from 0 to $30 million in Revenue a year—that's like 30, 36ish or something like that—and you look at the profit, you look at where it's being sold, you look at subscriptions, you look at all these different pieces, and a private Equity Fund is willing to pay a multiple of that in cash because that business is its own living and breathing thing. It has a tax return; it has employees; it is bankable. Right? An entity can get loans outside of a human based on creditworthiness and all that stuff, and at the end of the day, it is a sellable asset. And if I don't sell it, I could step away because you build it in such a way that it keeps generating income without you. Okay, and so I don't see other opportunities out there where you can go from quite literally nothing to at least a $5 million net worth—0 to $5 million. Right? Like most of the crazy money is made in Tech and AI and like all of these different areas—that's the fancy degree, that's that Royal background. Right? Your—your dad was a banker at Goldman, and you follow that, you know, route, and it's still kind of silly at the end of the day. We have the ability to make more money than those types. Right? Like when you really master this game and you play it for a while. So again, thinking about Enterprise Value and then more importantly thinking about these other levers of attention and awareness before I get into these other brands. Someone like Jake Paul—Jake Paul is not a real person. What do I mean? Jake Paul is a media company. At the center of Jake Paul is a media company. There is probably a hundred people working on the presence that is Jake Paul and helping execute those moves. Okay, that's the media engine that keeps generating awareness, but at the end of the day, if he still doesn't get on the camera and perform and entertain and be somebody that people want to see and work on that content distribution, he will go broke. Right? In—in theory, because there's no leveraged awareness and attention to a business that's going to change the game for him. Enter something like [ __ ] consumer products; they are already a nine-figure business because of all of that. Right? And then you get the right brand, the right systems, the right product-market fit—all these other pieces that make a company go—and now that is generational—generational—generational wealth that will pay for itself indefinitely. That's where your kids' kids' kids are good because you're mastering the game; you're playing it perfectly, and other people start to see this.
Even the king of YouTube, like, hats off—he is as good as it gets at that game. As good as it gets at personal branding for the whole first half of his career here; it still relied on him making content, selling courses, is curating this image; there wasn't an endgame. Sunglasses, big day—two great products, leveraging his awareness, leveraging his ecosystem, leveraging his name to create something that stands beyond him. Iman Gadhi. Welcome to Ecom; we are so glad to have you. My favorite podcaster: Chris Williamson, Modern Wisdom. Love what he's doing. A podcast is a media company; Chris Williamson is a media company. Right? At the center of all that again, he still has to do those episodes every single week. What does he do? Let me leverage that audience; let me look at what my audience likes; let me give them a product that I actually take, that I actually care about. Enter Neuro Tonic. Love that [ __ ]; actually like, love it. Perfect product-market fit. Isn't straying too far from the Rogan playbook, right? Joe Rogan, similar deal—10 years before Alpha Brain—number one nootropic in the land—multiple nine-figure exit to Unilever, I believe. Look it up, but same thing here with Chris—masterful. Let's jump over here: Ali—another great YouTuber—publicly realized, if I don't keep making content, I am going to be doing this forever. There's no endgame here, not to mention like a lot of the income from this stuff is ordinary—meaning it's taxed at 40%. When I sold Genius Brand, it's a 20% tax rate—huge difference on millions and millions of dollars—or you can move to Puerto Rico, you know, like me and Jake. But all he realizes is if he doesn't keep making content, then he's going to be on that treadmill of life forever—like it's just going to keep going. And so he's launching a keyboard. The problem with my current business is that everything is tied to me as an individual. If I decide to retire from making YouTube videos at some point, the business will ultimately die because like everything is downstream with this YouTube channel. I'm the one on the YouTube channel; I'm the one who's like teaching all of our courses, and therefore, like in many ways, it's not really a business; it's just a very well-paying job. A business is a vehicle that solves a problem for people and charges money for that problem. If that—that is tied to an individual, you have what is called keyman risk, and the keyman risk for this business is absolutely huge. In that my business, with my team of 20 people and all this sort of stuff, almost no one would actually want to buy that business because it's so reliant on me. And so the question that a lot of creators are asking in the Creator economy these days is, how can creators build businesses that are not reliant on them? And so, right—again, looking at his audience, looking at his media, solving a problem, and joining the wonderful club of e-commerce. Y'all are going to get mad at me, too, cuz I said like you don't need a personal brand; this is only like a little piece of this, so stay with me. I'm just showing—playing the right game. Chris Bumstead—another one. Man, I've been in fitness for eight years; I don't think anyone's ever been more loved. Shout-out Chris—like for real. He's doing amazing. Again, that train eventually departs the station; eventually, you are no longer relevant. Human attention is fickle; we've seen rises and falls like time and time again, right? And Chris realized that—what better time to start a supplement company while you're Mr. Olympia? They are doing numbers; he's got a good team; there's innovation; there's products, and he gets to plug it into what he's already doing. All of these have the opportunity to be Legacy companies that change the game forever in this new era. That's the other beautiful part of Ecom: people are always—what product should I sell? What product should I sell? Listen, the game is changing. Like, people like supplements are saturated; I'm like, no—all the old brands are being sold in Bodybuilding.com, and they're in GNC, and they're in Vitamin Shoppe. People aren't going to keep shopping in GNC and Vitamin Shoppe. Let me be the number one brand on Amazon as the ground shifts. Every single category is right for disruption. Do you think deodorant and body spray was like so due for disruption? Not—not really; like you have Axe, Old Spice, all these companies, but again, the game is shifting; demographics are changing; how people discover stuff is changing, and with that comes opportunity. And because you are privy enough to educate yourself on YouTube, I'm telling you all of this opportunity exists for you. What I'm saying is, you're young, and it's time to get money—to get rich. You need to understand the rules to the game. I want to explain e-commerce in its entirety here—a clear, step-by-step educational piece that you can fully understand before we move to the next piece. I actually want to see you get rich; I want to see you level up. There's a special opportunity that we'll highlight, and for you to take part in this, you need to understand the basics. These are your building blocks. What is e-commerce? It is the buying and selling of goods online. Consumers buy; we sell. It's that easy. Once you gamify being the person that everyone gives money to on Black Friday and Cyber Monday—Monday—things change forever. Okay, very, very happy holidays. So buying and selling—selling of goods online. Where do these things transpire? Places like Amazon, Shopify, you host your own website, Walmart—there's all these different places where e-commerce partakes, but the point is it's on a cell phone or it's on a computer screen; more and more so it's becoming on a cell phone, and that's important as we talk about this new opportunity. Who? Just anyone and everyone—that's why I said it's the ability to reach millions of shoppers; it's not just domestic; it can be international. Right? And so—so that's the beauty of this: you can reach literally everyone online—and that small remote village off the coast of Haiti that has no internet—they don't have any money anyway, so like you don't want to sell to them, you know. So anyone online. How? Product to the platform to the customer, and it's shipped and fulfilled. Most people—like something like Amazon—they house the product for you; they ship it to the customer—you know, door to door—you never even touch the product. Like think about that: when I built the Genius Brand—30 plus million in Revenue every single year—millions of dollars of inventory at any given time—I never had a warehouse; I never had an office; I had a team; we were managed remote, but all of my product would be made at a manufacturer and shipped directly to Amazon—very, very special time. And this continues to be the trend in Ecom, right? Simplify things for the entrepreneurs—that's what Jeff Bezos does; that's what this next opportunity does. But there's 3PLs that do the shipping for you—meaning third-party shipping companies—you don't need some massive, crazy operation. A lot of people get confused; they think they need to build out like all of this stuff; they see a warehouse—like that guy's really doing it—he's not. Okay, it's actually the new flex is to do $100 million without a warehouse, period. Also, how—like how do you reach these customers? Ads, content, influencers, word of mouth, sometimes real world. Right? But those are all the components that make e-commerce go. The question is why—right? Why do you want to do this? The Enterprise Value, the scalability—it is endlessly scalable. You have a product; you find as many people in the world that want that product; you reinvent the messaging; you find more people; you come out with a new product—all while you are not working that hard. Once you set the ads, once you get some of the infrastructure in place, once you build the system, this stuff tends to work for you. So we've had the Amazon era; we've had the Instagram era, influencer era; we've had Facebook ads; we've had all of these different time periods in Ecom exist, and the narrative goes like, oh, that thing's saturated now, and that's not how it works; it just—more people do it, it gets more difficult. If you were in it early, you tend to still succeed—like I still do very well on Amazon. Has it gotten harder? Yeah, for sure. Has the game changed? Yeah, for sure. Right? Still works, but of course, if you can be in something in the early innings, you are poised to make way more money. I know idiots that made millions with Amazon. Right? I'm probably one of them; I stayed at it. Right? A lot of these guys like lost their money or whatever. I love this game, but it's all about finding the new opportunity. What is the next Amazon FBA? And imagine if you were there in the first or even second inning—well, that's what TikTok Shop is. When I tell you we are doing $300,000 plus per day, it was not like that 18 months ago—before TikTok Shop, before short-form content, before I fully appreciated the opportunity staring us in our face—we were doing like literally a third of that. Maybe we'll do close to $100 million this year, and we did like maybe $15 million—that is insane. And that is what happens when the ground shifts and you really go for it. TikTok Shop represents the next era of e-commerce because people are no longer buying via ads; they're no longer buying via Insta influencers; they are educating themselves via 10- to 60-second videos that are served to them by an algorithm that knows their interests better than them. And so you, as a marketer, when you understand that and you can put organic content into the world at scale—content distribution—we'll talk about that more in detail later—then you can make millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even a billion. Let's see. I'm trying to do it real time, so I want you to know exactly where I came from. There's elements you're going to be able to pull from your life, but more importantly, I want you to see that like I am a normal guy. It's weird having a—a little social media audience nowadays where it's like, oh, you know, he's achieving these things, but I started this with nothing. Okay, and I found the internet, and I found some good opportunities, and fate broke for me, and we can talk about that later, but the truth is it's breaking for you right now.
So when I started in this world, I got out of college, and I graduated a little bit early. I'd done Running Start; I had some credits, and I'm sitting there like any 21-year-old dude who had a 2.6 GPA, and I'm getting high every day, playing Call of Duty, and this is like great for like 2 weeks, and then I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? Hold on, I got a girlfriend; she's probably going to want kids one day, like, huh? And so I go back home; I leave college early because I understand there's nothing but dime bags and a sick kill-death ratio that I still miss, for me, there. And I go back to my hometown; I'm like looking for things to do, and at a family dinner, my uncle is talking about his Amazon layout. Right? And my uncle is like the dumbest [ __ ] in the family, straight up. I have no problem saying that; I don't [ __ ] with him whatsoever nowadays. Okay, period. So he just bought a new boat, and he's got a BMW; he's got triplets, and he's like—he's living pretty well. I'm going, what is this dude doing to make money? He's telling me about Amazon and how he's helping these consumer electronic brands sell their products on Amazon. I'm like, if this guy's making money on this thing, I can make money on this thing. And so I look at this platform, and I'm like, wow, everything's sold here. I like supplements; I like working out; I'm going to start helping supplement Brands sell on Amazon. Got to learn sales; just start picking up the phone, calling every supplement brand around, emailing, telling them, I'm Robert Oliver; I'm a consultant; I help people sell on Amazon FBA. 9 out of 10 people tell me [ __ ] off. Eventually, I find a couple Brands; I get the brands listed; we start doing numbers; I start making commission. All of a sudden, fast forward 6 months of me working my ass off, too—I'm doing this every day; I'm making $20,000 plus a month—and all of a sudden I am this young Amazon Guru, and other brands are calling me. What I ultimately realize is these ancient dinosaur companies that are used to distribution—Vitamin Shoppe, little mom-and-pop shops—they are not getting the Amazon opportunity. I'm like, hey, Jeff—Jeff, you're doing half of your sales on this new platform; you signed me 6 months ago; we should probably double down, spend some more money here. He's like, actually, I'm going to spend all this money at this trade show and call me in like 2 weeks. I'm like—like really? Are you—are you not profitable here? Well, we're really profitable there, but you know, we got a relationship with this guy. And I'm like, okay, well, thank God I'm slightly autistic because I don't care about relationships, and I'm going to use this computer thing to start my own brand. That's when I started to realize I could probably do this better than those guys, but there's a lot of questions to still ask and understand, although I am picking up a lot of pieces of the business as a consultant. Right? And the truth be told, if one of those companies had brought me on full-time, they probably would have had to pay me like a million dollars a year; I would have made it for them 10 times over. I would have never started the Genius Brand, but they didn't. Ego's a [ __ ], right? And that—that's me saying this as well as myself. I hope I look back at this and always stay humble and always accept and understand the younger generations. But first steps: it's like, okay, I got to find a manufacturer; I do all these different pieces, and fate kind of smiled on me because I had a new manufacturer reach out to me; they knew I was like this Amazon guy, and they're like, hey, if you ever want to start Brands, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we eventually started a couple, but it led to the birth of the Genius Brand, where this was like my—my baby; this was the thing I wanted to do. Right? I had this fire in my heart of doing clinically dosed products, all natural. I had Amazon; I could charge more and make more expensive products. That led to—to this—didn't even know if it was going to work—decided I'm going to sell a fat burner for $50, which was crazy at the time because the top 20 bestsellers were $20, but I got with my partner at the manufacturer; I'm like, if we made a product that actually worked—like actually made a difference modestly—right, helped someone burn an extra pound a month by accelerating their metabolism, whatever—what would the cost be? And my cost was damn near what the other people were selling it for, and that's when I realized the industry is kind of [ __ ], but with an industry is [ __ ] and there's a new channel, you can make a difference. So we launched this first product, and we started doing sales—positive cash flow—next product, next product—started hiring my friends; I'm like, I am going for this [ __ ], you know what I mean? Like I can make a couple million dollars here; my life will change forever; I'm good. Riding high, and Amazon absolutely slaps the dog [ __ ] out of me, period. They put in this new AI algorithm—that basically said anyone who we think has ever gotten any sort of fake reviews, we are going to take their products to zero and hold it there. I lost half of my business overnight. The best part of this is it was literally on my wedding night. Okay, like I was so focused on this business for two plus years; didn't leave the computer ever; finally decide to elope—like we—we left the country—first time out of the country, first time in Europe—we get married; 6 hours later, my team's calling me, going, we have a problem. Sick to my stomach; almost puked. But this is where you learn something—by yourself, you included—cuz nothing in this life is all that serious. Okay, nothing in this life is all that serious. We sat down; we looked at everything objectively; I was like, man, I had a $10 million business; I could probably take like a million and a half cash; I could lay my friends off; I could run—or in this moment of adversity, I could double the [ __ ] down, use that money to launch new products; everyone's experiencing the same thing, so there's a bunch of new open categories, and again, we can put some trust, faith, belief in what we're doing and swing for the [ __ ] fences, and that is what entrepreneurship is about. We launched five new products; three of which became our bestsellers; business doubled 6 months later; Amazon admits they made a mistake; gave us our reviews back on all of those, and we're on that fast track to 30 plus million. That ultimately led to me selling the business—sold it too early, unfortunately, but again, another lesson learned, and my life changed forever at this finish line—26, about to turn 27—took a year or two off, got to find myself—all this stress, lost a friend—all sorts of great stories scattered all throughout my YouTube—check it out. I've lived an interesting life, but I realize retirement sucks. I am a 27, 28, 29-year-old multi-millionaire in this period—going—there is so much left—and then a little health scare where I thought I was going—going to die—you know, like all these weird things hit me—and it ultimately led me to this conclusion that we are all writing this individual Book of Life, and the only practical goal we should have is to max it the [ __ ] out—all of your interests, all of your stats. If you're not dreaming like massive—why dream at all? Because literally anything is possible. If you saw me go from here to—to here—to start living each and every one of my dreams, you would feel that. Live your first dream, even if it feels like crazy; spend a little too much money to do a thing, and then you start to realize that we are the ones that create this reality. Right? So that's my life-maxing philosophy; that's the playbook—gas pedal with all of it—led me back to—to building again—this is pre-TikTok Shop—starting new companies, investing in people, and doing the social media thing, too. Right? There's—there's broad goals, and social media is at the center of all of it. Ultimately, again, fate starts to smile; here's TikTok Shop. When you put the right things into the universe, it gives it back. The universe does not reward humility; other people might, but the universe does not reward humility. Shoot that [ __ ] shot. We are about to pour into hardcore tactics—like five steps to take you from idea to millions—but I want to leave you with like the three takeaways from this. Okay, write them down if you're that type, but three important takeaways with the life of Rob the Bank so far:
The internet: We are fortunate enough to do things that we are passionate about. I have loved every business I've ever worked on. I've let my interest guide my next business ventures, and I've followed that from day one because it's a it's a big internet. And when you think about finding the right product, chances are, if you're already in the niche as a consumer and you pivot to be an observer instead, you will find something you're passionate about. And when you're passionate about something, you are more likely to stick with it for the long term, just like I did when Amazon rocked my world, right?
And so again, the last piece of this: Are you seeing any success in this area, in any way, shape, or form, with TikTok Shop? That's the that's the last piece, and it ties to, you know, everything we've already talked about with being easily understood, passionate, solves a need, etc. And so when we get into the actual tools, there's a lot of ways to see what's trending, to see what exists. Coda.com, and I'll drop a link below for it, is plugged into the TikTok API, so they have everything. They have what products are succeeding, what creators have the top videos, what type of content's going viral—literally everything on this dashboard. So you can validate, you can study, you can get ideas. A saying that stuck with me forever: "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Virgil Abloh, one of my inspirations, coined the 3% rule, which is: If you make something 3% better, you are contributing to a better tomorrow. And so you find a product—mouth tape—you add a lavender scent to it. This is one of my students who's running a million-dollar brand. You are in the game. Haters say Virgil is a thief, copyright, whatever, whatever. Virgil died a legend. That framework is making others rich. When you get on here, find inspiration through other people's ideas in your niche, right? See what's working, see why it's working, spend time analyzing.
The real-world: Jungle Scout and Helium 10 are two others, both Amazon tools. You can actually filter something called—on Helium—the magnet score, where you can see how many people are searching for something and then how few products there are for that. You can literally get that data, so you can look: If something's blown up on TikTok, how's it doing on Amazon? Cross-reference those, triangulate, triangulate with Exploding Topics. This is another AI tool that pulls together literally everything on the internet, all these different data sources, and it tells you what is becoming viral. This can be broad, it can be on like a like a category like "looksmaxing." If you're in like the, you know, 16-to-25-year-old young men space, guys care about their looks more, like from a beauty perspective. I didn't know that. I'm 32. I get on Exploding Topics and I see looksmaxing. Go check that on TikTok, see what kind of products are being sold, see what's being sold on Amazon. There's a [ __ ] gold mine. That is the game: Triangulation. And then, most importantly, shooting your [ __ ] shot. Just choose one product. It can change your life. You're going to hear me say it one more time: If not now, when?
Step number two: I got the word "cult" down here, and this is by far the most exciting, controversial, inflammatory, emotional component of all of this. I need you to think about all of this stuff rationally and objectively. Checklist here before we get into the cult stuff: You need to define your actual brand identity. So when you think about products that you buy in your specific niche already, what do they look like, or what are you particularly interested in, like as a consumer? I want you to serve yourself with all of this big-brain move as you advance further. You're doing something like supplements or skincare, and you decide to transcend the industry in its entirety, while still referencing things that you think is cool. So like something like Evil Goods—we did a beef-tallow product—and if you look at all skincare products, they look a very specific way: Earthy, natural. This, we come in with a 1970s Marilyn Monroe-looking character screaming "Evil Goods"—loud, disruptive, designed for TikTok, but still something that the brand owners like; it appeals to us, right? I think that's the recipe at the center of all this when you're defining your brand identity.
The next part here: A lot of this creativity can be done with imagination via AI. And so I have tools over here later, but DALL-E, Midjourney—the ability to bring visual life to an idea with a few clicks is insane, and something we are already taking for granted. But when you want to design your brand and you get to mood boarding and thinking, you can do it for free because you have AI to help bring this to life. And so that again has reduced the barrier to entry for everyone, right? The excuses are getting less and less; it's getting easier and easier to bring something to the world. And so we have that there. Tactically speaking, AI has not got to the point where it can design a label or like a box or any of that, and so we we need a designer for that. But again, some of these designers—you go over to the Philippines or Romania—you're talking $10 to $20 an hour, and most of the heavy lifting has already been done with artificial intelligence, right? Somewhere like 99designs, Upwork—another one—those are completely in play for everyone, and that's where you're going to finalize all of the assets, right? And then there you you literally have your brand aesthetically designed.
Now, at the center of all of this, though: What makes a brand sticky or last for the long term? One of my favorite stories is the Lululemon founder: A man comes out with women's leggings, and he decides he will absolutely, under no circumstances, make double XL because he does not want fat [ __ ] wearing his product. That is drawing a line in the sand of who you support and who you don't, and that's actually very key in the early stages of building a brand. You need to be very clear on who you actually serve. And there's layers to the cult branding, right? There's there's like depth to it, but you, from an entry level, when you're putting together your identity, when you're thinking about your tagline, when you're thinking about your "why," I want you to serve the most radical group that you belong to. Don't worry about the size; a couple hundred customers can make you millions, right? You start doing all the math: Repeat buyers, like that is the perfect way to jump off and go from zero to at least a million. And so just one more time here: Use AI. It is so easy. If you haven't played around with it yet, it's fun. It is the future; it's not something to fear. It has never been easier to do this. Back—start—genius. I needed to find good designers, I needed to to find creative uh creative people, and now all of a sudden with a couple clicks I can come up with a concept from literally scratch, and it's only going to get better month over month, year over year. It will accelerate, it'll accelerate, it'll be designing your labels, it'll be doing all sorts of beautiful things. Make sure you are one of the people that partakes, so you're not force-fed universal basic income while the rich get richer.
We found the right product, we designed our cult brand, now we need a manufacturer to actually make the product. Some people don't know this, but like most of the products you buy, they don't physically make the products themselves. So when I'm building a Genius brand, I have multiple contract manufacturers—that's the terminology—contract manufacturers that I place purchase orders with that then create the product for me, put my label on it, and ship it. And this could be custom, right? There's factories that do other unique things. Apple—Apple makes all of their products in Taiwan; they have factories over there, right? And so contract manufacturers make the world go around. Most importantly, contract manufacturers are in the business of making your product; that is how they keep their lights on. But when finding the right manufacturer, there's a couple different ways to go about this. So for consumable products, supplements, skincare, domestic is the way to go, all right? I want USA, homegrown manufacturers. They have FDA guidelines, like all of that stuff matters, especially when you're selling on Amazon. TikTok will continue to put in guardrails, but physical products, like hard goods—so you know, think yoga mat, like any hard good—yoga mats, computer chairs, whatever, all these making, you know, keypads, like all of that stuff can be made overseas; it's much cheaper. And so I got a couple hacks for you, too, to help you find good manufacturers because Google is great for just like Googling "supplement contract manufacturer"; you're going to find 20 pages of decent contract manufacturers. And then there's things like Alibaba; you know, you want to you want to make a again a yoga mat, you'll find tons of factories that actually do that. You can reach out to them, you can negotiate.
But let's get a little more specific and steal suppliers because there's ways to do that. There's tons of different tools, and again I want to give you as much value and sauce as humanly possible. So when you're identifying competitors in your specific category—so something like the mouth tape, right, good example there—there's like one or two other ones on the market: Hostage tape, and we found them. There's a tool called ImportYeti. So the way Customs works and international trade: Every time something comes in, it gets documented and registered, and if you have the company name, the product type, you can use ImportYeti to literally find where their manufacturer is coming from. And so that is a direct plug into finding the supplier of your competitors. And even if you're making it 3% better, you know, you have the the basic piece here together, right? Like that's a great entry point. Again, this doesn't work for domestic products, supplements, things like that, but it is a hell of a tool for improving upon an idea. All right, then you need to review quality with all this stuff. So when you're going through the process with a manufacturer, sometimes they'll require a deposit, sometimes they won't. If you've been doing it for a while, if you speak the right lingo—I'll talk about that later—but you will get a sample first. They might send you a generic sample of their work, then they'll send you a prototype of your product. A lot of back and forth where you're reviewing the quality, and during this time, this is where you're also vetting their communication, right? How responsive are they? How professional do you matter? All of these different components are going to shape the relationship. The manufacturing component is relationship-heavy: Who do you know, and who can get [ __ ] done for you, and who's actually on the ball, right? Cuz there's—I'll tell you right now—you're going to have problems in manufacturing; it is guaranteed. I'm going to tell you right now: You need to kiss a lot of toads. We'll talk we'll talk about this. Reps is like my final step here: Reaching out to 20, 30, 40 manufacturers, learning the communication style, vetting, understanding, getting on the phone, talking to them, maybe even visiting factories if it's humanly possible. Understanding what makes a good manufacturer and what doesn't is what's ultimately going to set you fundamentally strong because your manufacturer is your lifeblood. Even Apple, right? If those factories in Taiwan weren't able to procure the chips and they had some massive layoff or a foreign power invaded and all of a sudden the factory didn't work anymore, Apple, a trillion-dollar company, is cut off from their lifeblood. Okay? And so that's where reaching out and building these relationships really [ __ ] matters. All right, so just to summarize here, that's the entire game. One more little tip that we've been using lately for students inside of MDBC: Using ChatGPT to officially write your outreach email—like, hyper-professionalized, super-dialed in—and um accelerates that whole process. But again, this is where you have to work, right? This is finding 20 different manufacturers, getting those reps up, intuitively learning what works and what doesn't—all part of the game. But getting rich was never going to be that easy.
Step four here: This is where the money starts to actually get printed. The benefit with my playbook, what I'm showing you guys: TikTok is where you get your first customers for more or less free; Amazon is where you get repeat buyers; and private equity is going to come in and pay you a multiple of how many repeat buyers you have. That's the basic e-com wealth playbook, and you can stack on that in all sorts of ways. You could go to Walmart, like there's other pieces, but that's the basics. Learn those platforms. TikTok Shop is extremely straightforward; it's all about the content. We'll cover that next. Amazon, a little more intricate, but if you can competently list it, get images, all this stuff together, you will win. Okay? So again, just—I am operating from the the frame of a beginner, an absolute beginner, not a lot of resources. I am going to again use AI to generate the product pics, all of that stuff you see on the on detail page; that is going to be made with AI. Sound too good to be true? Brain Nista, one of my students, now one of my partners—I invested in his business—he did over $150,000 yesterday. Crazy startup brand made entirely with AI. Brainista—feel free to look it up on Amazon—yerba mate product, Yerba Magic. He's killing it, and he spent a lot of time learning the AI. There's a free master course he put together. Follow me on IG; I'll hook you up there on that. But again, the barrier to entry has never been easier, and the level of scale is grander than ever. Period. Like it's that straightforward. So the question is: Are you going to do the work? Are you going to learn it? Again, when you're writing copy for a lot of these things, you know the product well, but have ChatGPT help flush all that stuff out for you. Hey, I need five Amazon bullet points; these are the benefits of my product; I'm a cult brand; this is who I'm not serving. Learn all of that, and again the AI will do the heavy lifting for you. But more importantly, at the center of all of this, you are learning practical business skills of the future. You want to feel fulfilled; you want to feel like you're moving towards something; that is what all of this is, right? Like I'm I'm—now I'm I'm a veteran in this game, I'm getting older, and all of these skills are things that I've developed in my life, and now I'm staying up to date with the relevant technology. In that process, you learn to become a wealthy, Wi-Fi business owner. That's that's it, right? So again, don't d to work when you're getting into this, too.
One other important piece is reviews. Okay, you need reviews, and that can be—Amazon has strong terms of service; I'm not telling you directly on Amazon. We can talk TikTok, we can talk Amazon, we can talk loosely, but friends and family are good resources. There is um, you know, places like Join Brands—JoinBrands.com—where you can get creators to try your product and potentially leave a review. But this is another important piece: Remember, people accept what they see online to be true. And so a product with 100 reviews is good, factually, because 100 people said so, right? And so that's a that's an important piece of all this. Your listing will be beautiful on Amazon; you'll get to the TikTok traffic piece; we'll cover that in the next slide. And all in all, it is pretty straightforward; like, there is not a deep level of complexity with this game; it's simply about execution, and more importantly, most people just aren't doing it. All right, that's the truth. You—most people see this video, you'll watch it, all you'll feel good about yourself, you might even tell your friend how to launch a brand on TikTok from that "rob the bank" guy, and then you'll go back to your 9-to-5 or whatever, right? Times are going to continue to change. These are some of the tools: JoinBrands.com, ChatGPT, obviously, um, DALL-E and Midjourney. You'll need Amazon Seller Central, you'll need TikTok Seller Central. But again, let AI do the heavy lifting for you.
This next slide is magic. If you absorb nothing else from this entire thing, I want you to absorb this slide because this is where all of the actual money is made, and this is why there is a literal gold rush. When we talk about TikTok Shop and TikTok specifically, I need you to understand how people discover your e-com products, right? We talked e-com, we talked how people find it: Ads, social media, word of mouth, etc., etc. When you talk about scale, TikTok has a billion-plus users, something like that—call it most of the United States at this point, right?—and their ability to serve organic content—organic meaning nobody paid for it—so TikTok's algorithm is serving organic content to people that want to see that content. More importantly, people that want to buy that potential product or idea, right? TikTok isn't just all the dancing apps now; you're seeing products, you're seeing services, you're seeing all of these different opportunities materialized because of this short-form content discovery app. And so at the center of how TikTok Shop works, it is—I don't want to say "gamifying," but understanding how to create algorithmically relevant content that the algorithm will serve to people that will buy your stuff. Period. And TikTok, of course, is in the business of making money; they get a little chunk of that sale, less than Amazon, and so they want to push that content; they they want to make it a win-win. And so you, as a business owner operator, you can scale a business to seven figures literally creating videos from your iPhone. "Sell me this pen." You're not an influencer; you're not a personal brand. "Sell me this pen." You hold up your phone, which I don't have on me cuz I don't want to be distracted, and you pull the pen into the frame; you put an AI voiceover on it, and all of a sudden you know some crazy pitch on why you need this pen, and all of a sudden TikTok shows this video to 5 million people, and you just did $100,000 in sales without spending a dime. That is the power of this game. And if you go on Cow Data—which I did not include on the tools, but we'll talk about that later—you can see the videos that have already won. And what did I say? What did I say earlier? Good artists do what? Great artists do what? Yeah, steal. Their videos—make them 2, 3% better. The ideas that have already gone viral can be improved upon and ran by yourself. And you can do this all yourself, but I want to show you the game plan, the blueprint that's going to push nine figures for me in 12 months, which is truly surreal to actually say, but for you, this can be that opportunity that gets you double-digit millions. Colin, who I was talking about earlier with Brainista—the Yerba Mate on Amazon—you look it up—his problem right now—he texted me the other day—he goes, "Bro, I am about to spend a house on inventory because that's how much sales we're doing." Those are the problems you will experience in this world; that is what it takes to be Wi-Fi wealthy, to really scale this up.
If you're not making the content yourself, you get other creators. See, the thing with TikTok is it is a discovery platform. On Instagram, YouTube, how many followers you had matters. On Instagram, if you're a brand, your follow account matters, right? Those followers are like loyalists, and they get you on their feed. Instagram is organic; people don't go to people's profiles like that; you're served mostly organic content. And so a new creator who just opened an account for your brand can push out one video and all of a sudden get millions of views. So with that in mind, what happens if you have 30 creators making a single video a day? Because the truth is, most of them are going to strike out, right? Not everything goes viral; most things don't go viral, but virality is a strategy in this era. And so when you get multiple creators pushing out a video a day, your ability to go parabolically viral is insane—is insane. So you need to find creators, right? And there's a huge ecosystem for this. I have something called Your First Dollar; my partner Jimmy Farley has a group called Creators Corner—bigger-ticket stuff here, right? You're spending $15 to $20,000 to access his creators. YFD—Your First Dollar—is a smaller community where you can find creators, Twitter, places like that. But finding creators is step one, and then you're going to implement a retainer model. Again, if you don't want to do this yourself, but you can go into YFD, do a job posting: "I will pay $200 for the month if you do 30 video posts for me." Look at their track record, all of that stuff, and then you are going to put that person on retainer. Get at least 10, right? Two grand, three grand, four grand, five grand—the more you have, the better. Again, I still recommend making content yourself, but then you're going to monitor V for virality; see what pops off. And the second a single creator pops off, all the other creators are going to replicate that content style, and you are going to maximize organic reach. And this is how product after product is blowing the [ __ ] up right now on TikTok Shop, and it's why it is changing everything because not only not only are they going to buy on TikTok Shop, but all the people who are old—not like me—I bought on TikTok Shop; I'm still young—kind of—don't laugh behind the camera, bro. You heard my feelings. My my point on that is all those people are going to go buy on Amazon. My mom, she's on TikTok, but she's not going to buy on TikTok Shop, but she just saw this product; she loves it three times; she's going to go on Amazon. Now, all of a sudden your Amazon sales skyrocket. What if you're in Walmart, right? If you're a legacy brand, then they see it; they make that association; that's how marketing works. And the point is you can get extreme traffic and scale with not a whole lot of money in, and that is the arbitrage.
The question everyone loves to ask: How much money do I need to start? Surprisingly, it's not as much as you would actually think. But listen, if you're broke, first off, I'm sorry; I know it's probably painful, and it's not your fault. And don't worry, you met Rob the Bank; you're never going to fail; you're going to get rich. But stick around for real because these skills are important. And if you have literally nothing—remember, I had literally nothing, and I had to learn these skills and get into this world and eventually enterprise and boss up—so I got stuff for you, but I want to cover the tactical—like what it really costs to start and launch a brand—and it's variable depending on the product you choose and you know your opening order, all that stuff. But I want to give you the the general framework. All in here, let's just let's just jump to total costs: 4 to 12,000 is, you know, if you're your bootstrap balling; it could be more. You do a complicated supplement, something like that, it can definitely get up there, but this is just the general world. So product development: This is an area where it could be zero, but if you're trying to get a custom prototype or some unique hard good, you can spend a couple thousand there for sure, right? So we'll put 0 to 2,000 there. Branding and packaging: Depending how good you are with the AI, it can be damn near nothing, right? You hire a little bit better designer, you go a little more aggressive there, it can easily be upwards of 2,000. Again, we're using overseas designers; we're still using the AI basics of this. If you go to like a high-end branding firm—just so you guys know, I've done this with brands—you can spend multiple six figures to like really nail it in, but at the end of the day, you can have a sexy, beautiful brand with no means of scaling, no TikTok, no Amazon, and it's worthless. So 2,000. Opening inventory: Run something like the mouth tape, right? My guy has $2 a unit; he ordered 1,000 units to start—$2,000 all in. So even less than this, right? But most products can be upwards of five, six, $7; maybe you order 40 uh 500 units, smaller runs, but it's safe to budget 3,000 to 5,000. That marketing that we just talked about: You can make the videos yourself; it could be zero. You also can get 20 kids on retainer at 200 bucks a pop uh 15 15 at 200 bucks a pop; you're all in three grand. That's your general range here. Like I said, though, if you have absolutely zero money, you have to make your first—let's call it—15,000. I got something for you. So I mean, like the truth: There's never a good time to be poor, but if there was ever like a good time to be poor and try to get rich, it's probably now. If you have like hustle, grit, and you're willing to watch an entire video like this, you definitely have what it takes, and I don't want to hear any of that "I'm in this country or that" because the truth is, entrepreneurs figure out how to succeed, period. So if you need to get to your first—call it—$20,000 to launch your own brand, this is really the ladder here. Remember, these brands—my brands—succeed because independent creators are making videos, and they make a commission, a retainer, a commission. You get on TikTok Shop; it's automatic. You blow up—my cologne—I had a kid make $80,000 in a single month. $80,000 in a single month. Better believe I printed with it, too, right? It's like the ultimate win-win. But the benefit of being an affiliate is you need literally nothing to start. Period. Like I said, you can make a new TikTok; you don't need followers; you don't need um a following; you don't need any previous skills; like it is literally just an iPhone and some hustle. And so to start in that world—that was my whole point of Your First Dollar—it's a $50-a-month subscription community where you join, and we plug you directly in to my brands—you know, Rep Heroes, Top Shelf, the like, call-ins, like all of those are here ready to pay you a retainer. Complete the material, apply, and you will Forex your money immediately. But then you learn how all this works, and you get good, right? You're a TikTok Shop creator; you're leveling up. Eventually, like I said, I paid the one kid 80,000. The god tier of this—like the the final boss on the affiliate side—is my partner Jimmy Farley and Creators Corner. I've never seen a program like that where he—kids come in—I'll have a a link down there, too—and the way he educates and takes care of them and builds that community is second to none. There's over a hundred kids making $10,000-plus a month; some of them are starting brands; others are getting equity in brands. But that's like the the level to get to—50 to 100,000 further in, you know, e-com—like like I I I talk to a lot of these kids—like it's really getting into the future of this world, right? And that that's the the tier ladder for you.
Step four: Launch a brand. This is the entire roadmap to start from nothing to getting to generationally internet wealthy, and I've been cooking on this video for you. I hope you see that. Some people are like, "Thank you, Rob. I love the content." You know what I always say? "Thank me by getting rich yourself." It's right here. Lot of info packed in there, and if you made it this far, you are going to make it. Like, actually, you are going to make it. Most importantly, though, I want you to remember something: The journey—always—this whole process of figuring it all out, everything you've been through to this point and everything you're going to go through to get rich—rich—that is the point. If I was 22 again, I would trade everything. Period. All the struggle, all the stress, and that's just real, right? So it's finding enjoyment and love in that entire process. It has been such an honor to teach and bring forward what I've learned on the internet, building Million-Dollar Brand Club. Like I I try to again throw everything out there for you, regardless of where you're at in life. I try to think through that lens: If you have absolutely nothing, if you're trying to start a brand, all of those pieces matter right now. I try to serve all the way through with non-stop ventures, investing in these companies with Million-Dollar Brand Club, giving you more hands-on, like a real mentorship, right? And so again, if that's something you want to be a part of, with any of it, MDBC is open; like you got to you know apply at the link below, and let's talk more for real. I mean, you made it through this. Anything is possible—possible. I said in the beginning: No point in dreaming if you're not going to dream as big as humanly possible, cuz we can only achieve what we actually envision and believe. It's the beautiful part of being human. And uh, I appreciate you for [Music] real. What.