Venture Step

Dalton (00:01)
Welcome to Ventures Set podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Ever wanted to peek behind the curtain of a brand new e -commerce company? Today, we'll be talking about Vibition, the product research struggles, and the social media tricks to help you spot new customers. Before we dive in, I'm your host, Dalton. I've got a bit of a mixed background between programming, data science, and insurance. Offline, you can find me.

running, building my side business or lost in a good book. You can listen to this podcast in video and audio format on Spotify and YouTube. If you're a prefer audio only, you can find this podcast anywhere you find your podcast, but especially on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. Vibition. So today we'll be discussing Vibition where the company is and how do you go about organic product research and

maybe some tools that might help with just discovery process, not necessarily organic discovery, but just all out discovery.

First, let's talk about Vibition. Vibition is a company that was co -founded by myself and my partner Lisa. We founded Vibition a couple of years ago before I got admitted into my masters. And obviously the masters was a high workload with it being STEM. So I had to bow out, unfortunately, and it was too much for Lisa to do by herself. So we kind of put it on pause, but we always had.

the ambitions of starting things back up after school ended for myself. And so I'm kind of trying to lead the way and on the path of forgiveness from Lisa, where I am getting the fire for the lantern. I'm getting the kerosene to burn the lantern and get a hot fire before I bring in Lisa again. So obviously she's gonna be involved in the product decisions, but.

I am trying to do the grunt work on the front end to help out. So Vibition was an e -commerce company. We were FB &A and that FB &A is Fabulant by Amazon, if you're not familiar. And we can go a little bit detail, maybe a couple of sentences a little bit later, but Vibition sold products on, or I say products, it's really one product, maybe some variants, but.

Definitely just one product. We sold our product on Amazon and we had some struggles that I talked about and it was honestly so fun. It was great. It was a lovely learning experience to be honest. Love the battle, love the fight of it all. We lost, long story short, we lost the battle, but what about the war? So we're coming back for more. Maybe not with the same product or the same segment, but we'll be back and we really enjoyed.

the experience and it was fun, challenging, and overall a great learning experience. So that being said, we had some issues and I can kind of talk about it in a couple sentences where we had a product that we discovered, would not organic discovery, we used kind of a tool that helps you find a product and we're like, oh, this is our winning product, but really we're not the only geniuses out there.

that are paying for the service. You have to be cautious. But we felt good about it and felt like we would have a kind of head start on other people. But we ran into the issue of COVID. COVID happened when we were placing our order. And so everything got shut down. Money's already sent. Everything happened and things got delayed. Shipments got delayed. Everything needed to be, you know, additional inspections and difficult...

security issues with the US and China and all that other stuff. And so our product was delayed quite a bit and other products that are other brands, they were able to get a head start on us. And then, you know, our estimations for our keywords were out of whack because we didn't expect the...

I would say we didn't expect that many people to recognize the product and have something already up and listed in a brand build, et cetera, et cetera, in such a short amount of time, especially with everything going on. And so we kind of just fell behind with, you know, our pricing didn't line up because of our keyword issues and the acquisitions were high or our customer acquisitions were high.

because of that and then that ate into our margins and then, you know, customers are coming in there or companies are coming in there or customers coming in there looking for deals. Companies were providing those deals with coupons or sales. And so it made it, it made it a difficult environment. We sold out eventually. I don't think we got long -term fees or anything like that. So that was fine, but it did take a while and it wasn't

Nick's successful venture for sure. So, but it was successful for the mind. If you're watching the video, I pointed my index finger into my brain, but it was, it was really fun. So can't wait to get back into it. But that was vibration or is vibration. Vibration school, I would say would be to be a sustainable.

e -commerce brand. What do I mean? Like I would like to have the products not use plastics or anything like that. And if we do need to use things that aren't sustainable, try to have it be from recycled goods. Why do I want to do that? Well, I grew up and live in Florida and taking care of your beaches and your environment is something that is implanted in you as a kid. And

and it's definitely valued in the community and it's something that I think is important. So that being said, there's also some benefits I think like if you have this sustainability, you kind of put out a niche where your products might be more expensive than say a product that isn't sustainable and maybe you'll lose out on that customer. But the customer that you do get, I feel like would be a little bit more sticky and the...

They have a tight knit group with their other friends and they'll tell their friends and their friends will tell other friends and then kind of hopefully it snowballs, right? But I'm not there yet because the first product was, was related to sustainability. It was a fishing magnet and, and it was all about taking waste out of the oceans and rivers. So we thought it was a great start, but it was a faulty start. So anyways, that's Vibition. So I talked about some things that,

people may not be familiar with. So I talked about FBNA, FBA, and then I also talked about keywords. I'll talk about fulfillment by Amazon, FBA first, and kind of talk about it a little bit in detail -ish, just to make sure if people aren't familiar, they're aware, and then maybe they could be like, wow, that's how that works. So fulfillment by Amazon is basically all those products on

Amazon, a majority of the ones that say prime will, and especially like the one day shipings, those products are FBA. So Amazon fulfills that. Let's say Amazon's warehouse. And so their employees, their robots, they fulfill those orders and they actually sidebar, they have an algorithm that depending on your shopping, shopping purchase history,

they predict whether you're going to purchase an item. So they might know that you purchase like you're say, if you don't have a subscription, you buy paper towels every month and a half. They'll ship paper towels to a warehouse nearby. It's just so that product is ready for you curated just for you personalized without even knowing they do do that with each of our products. And, and so your tastes and habits are recorded.

with this machine learning algorithm and then products are shipped to your house without, or not shipped to your house, but close by to your house without you knowing. And then, you know, you might get your product like within five hours or eight hours or however, or within a day. But that's how that works. It's not like they mysteriously have all these products nearby that you would want. It's because Amazon knows what you want. That was a sidebar.

Anyways, back to the main story of this topic or the main idea objective fulfillment by Amazon is when a company, a third party company ships their products to Amazon. Amazon then distributes their products to various warehouses across the country to allow them to do these one day shipings that Amazon customers are associated with or associate Amazon with.

with those fulfillments, there are fees. So you'll have fees for the weights of the product, size of the product, how heavy is it if it's electronic or if it's got liquid or cosmetic, and there's all these kind of parameters that determine the price and the storage fees and the fulfillment fees, but there's also the, I think like the distribution fee, like where.

there's a fee associated with distributing the products to Amazon warehouses. And then there's a return fee. Now, if your returns go over 10 % and then there's like these long -term fees, short -term fees. And so your fees changes depending how long your products are there. And so there is a lot of variables that you have to manage with FBNA, but it makes it easy because then you're kind of baked into this product that has millions of daily users that are spending money and

they know what they want and it's easy to get revenue that way.

I said all that to say that when you buy something on prime, as listed as a prime item, most likely that item, especially one day shipping, most likely that item is being shipped from Amazon warehouses, from a third party seller or private label is what they call it.

That is one way Amazon makes money. I mean, they don't make a killing. They make the majority of their money from the cloud, but it makes things a little bit more sustainable where they could push off some of these infrastructure costs to the third party sellers. That is FBA. The next thing I talked about was keywords. Keywords are...

Keywords are words that are associated with an item on Amazon or a thing. So I would think of keywords as, let's do an analogy of a recipe. So a recipe might have, you make one thing and it has tomatoes, onions, lettuce, maybe some raisins or something, like a salad.

all of those things associated with that item, say we call it Dalton salad, Dalton salad, those ingredients would be kind of the key words kind of thing. So the words that are associated with the parent item is how you could think about it.

Keywords, you would use keywords to run ads and you would have different prices for each keyword. So maybe if you're on video, if you're watching me on video, you're not on video. Maybe you are, who knows? If you're watching this video, I have an aloe plant behind me and some books. And so in this example, maybe I'm looking for a pot for my aloe plant.

And maybe I want, like there might be a keyword called like aloe plant pot. And then there might be one for like succulents pot or I don't know, a teal pot. And so obviously, you know, the ones that are targeted and.

more targeted and direct to what the user is looking for. So if I type in, if there's millions of people typing in like aloe plant pot or something like that, that keyword would cost more than others. So maybe less people are buying like aloe plant pot teal or something. So that's less competitive because it's less broad and maybe you can get the customer acquisition.

that you want for less money. Who knows? It's just an arbitrary example of how that works. So that's how Google works, Amazon, any of these like search engine -ish stuff, they use keywords and so you bid on the keyword and if a keyword has a lot of bidders, then the price goes up. So that is keywords, that's FBNA, I talked about Vibition, I gave an overview of Vibition.

And so where is Vibition now? Right. Vibition had a product, doesn't have a product, hasn't been worked on in about a year and a half, I think. So it's been a while since we're, we're rubbing off the rust and we're getting back in there. You know, we, we aim to live in the home space. People are spending more time on their home, not on their home, but in their home, like working from home, being at home.

There's an emphasis of being outside, being in nature, and living healthy, obviously, and also making the most of your space that you have at home. Things in places are becoming more expensive than they used to, and it's becoming so at a fast pace. And I know you've felt it, we've all felt it, and it's talked about on the news, it's talked about.

on the internet and people talk about how it's, you know, they're having difficulties making ends meet. There is always going to be this downward pressure with these kind of factors on people having to make the most of their space. You know, I have, if you're watching a video, I'm saving for a house and so I'm living at my Nana's and helping remodel her place. And so I'm working, I have a desk, I'm working here from home. And then I also have to sleep in my same room.

crazy. A lot of people do it, but I was going nuts with having such a low amount of space, like walking around space that I built some Murphy bed. When I say built, I purchased, I built a Murphy bed before, but it is a pain to cut all the wood, clean the wood, paint it, sand it, all that other stuff. It's a lot of work. You're better off just buying a Murphy bed and then putting it together.

But this Murphy bed was a little bit more work than normal because you had to put the frame on and.

drill all the holes yourself, which was like 300 screws, which was crazy.

But anyways, I say that as an example of making the most of your space. And so you might have these storage opportunities or something. There's gotta be something there that kind of allows these residents or people that live at their own house to live a better life or a more comfortable life with less space. Because I think as the population increases and

Things are getting more expensive.

Space costs more money. I mean, it's pretty simple. So those are some things that Vibition would like to solve. How do we get there? Because we're in the very early stages. I would like to talk about product research and then I would like to talk about how does a product work? What kind of tools can you use? And then organic product research are the kind of the topics that I...

I'm going to touch on.

Okay, oh, one side note, I thought it's kind of funny. But so when we first founded Vibition, we were unaware that there was another company similarly named called Viration, I think. Viration. Yeah, Viration, I think. Viration. When we were started selling on Amazon, when you type in Vibition, Viration was the one coming up because they had their more indexed and in Amazon, and they were just more established as a brand. And

our page when you typed in vibration was just flooded with sex toys. So I think I try to look it up as an example. I wasn't going to show it on video, but it would have been funny to put our products next to each other, but I couldn't find it on Amazon. So maybe they went out of business. I'm not sure. Hope they're doing well, but I thought that was hilarious because we unbeknownst to ourselves, we, we are positioned with a similar name of a.

of a sex company. Okay, so, Vibition Product Hunt. So, I'm just gonna talk about some key metrics. We're not gonna really list them all. I think that it's a complicated process, and I would describe it as like buying a house. Like when you buy a house, like you're looking, you go at the house, you're like, oh, this looks cute. Let me check it out. You go inside, you smell around, you look at the floors, you...

open and close the doors, check the, check the drawers in the, in the kitchen and, you know, make sure the stove functions, blah, blah, blah. And then you go and you look around and be a little nosy, check out the neighbors, check out the neighborhood, how's everyone's grass, the cars. And there's all these factors. And so just because something looks on the surface, a good idea, or in this case, a good house doesn't necessarily mean it is.

And so there's all these things that you have to do and peel back the onion before you can decide whether it's good or not. And so I can't really go over everything over this call. I said call, but I'm just, I'm just used to meetings at work over the podcast. And I'm a little wired out because short short circuiting, because I've been up since five. I worked late and.

I've only been off work for a little bit in the podcast comes on. It's supposed to drop in, uh, let's see, like two hours, an hour and a half. So we're getting, we're getting it done. So anyways, just throwing that one out there.

But you have to kind of look through all these factors and just because something looks good on the surface doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. That being said, you can look at the search volume, you can look at your competitors, you can see whether it makes sense to source the product, like how much can you source it for, how long will that take, how expensive are the keywords, and how much will it cost to ship?

to yourself and then.

How much will it take to get this on X platform or sell it yourself or where are you gonna store it? How are the feeds gonna be with Amazon? Is this a seasonal product or a product that is constantly selling? Do people need to do repeat purchases? Is it kind of like something where you could offer a subscription? So maybe an example, I mean it's lame but.

I'm just doing everything on the fly. One take is you have a flower company and maybe you sell the vase and then you offer flowers for half off the first time, maybe half off for the first three times. And so they just get used to having flowers and a nice aroma in their house. And they are constantly purchasing the new flowers after those three times because you kind of built up a customer habit. And as long as you,

Keep that customer happy, you keep that customer.

That would be something where, okay, like the flowers die, the customer needs to redo a repeat purchase, and that's really great. Because you don't have to worry about.

acquiring a new customer. And so your life cycle spend of that customer is higher. The overall acquisition costs are lower. And that means that you have to spend less on advertising and more on just keeping the customers you have, which is cheaper than acquiring new customers.

Those are kind of some things you could think about. It is difficult because it's time consuming. There really, there's a lot of products out there, but there really is no substitute other than just getting down in there and just going through and ripping through, looking at ads, looking at products, looking at competitors, websites, their ads, their creatives, and seeing what the customer sees.

and see how the customer reacts and whether these ads are doing well on social media and going from there. There are some products that help out and I kind of mentioned earlier there's a product called Jungle Scout and I think Helium 8, those products help you research or I guess those services help you research products and those services help you. I think Helium upgraded their services to kind of match Jungle Scout but.

I'll be good to talk about them. Sorry, I had a cough.

They'll help you manage your inventory, forecasting, keyword research.

I think I said sourcing, keyword research, product research, product trends, related products. So they basically are full suite product too. I think they also handle accounting too and profits.

That being said, it's kind of a full suite to product research and they do save a lot of time, but the only issue is that you're not the only one seeing that same data. So they could, when I say they, the users see the same thing you're seeing. So you're not some kind of genius that discovered this unknown element that is gonna change the world. You're seeing the same thing as others are seeing.

and they're seeing the same thing that you're seeing. So you must be aware of that and kind of take precautions when you are researching products on those kind of services.

But they're definitely worth it if you're trying, if you already know kind of an idea and you want to look a little deeper, look a little deeper, that would save lots of time. Because it takes a lot of time to figure out what keywords you should be looking for, and then you have to go on your own and see how, like, estimate the price of those keywords and figure that all out and.

There's just a whole, there's a whole slew of things that you need to troubleshoot before you go like, okay, this looks okay. And if you take too long, then the opportunity might be gone because someone else took it and it becomes too, maybe someone else, maybe a big party took up, took up the reins. They have a crazy website with 20, a product suite of 20 products and they've got more capital. So you're just going to be, you got to be aware of getting stomped or getting crowded.

I've mentioned earlier in the podcast about organic product research. And so what is organic product research? Organic product research is something where there is no substitute other than just doing the work and getting it done. And I talked about that in the segment above. How do you do that? And what is organic product research? So organic product research is seeing what the customer sees.

So you would create an account on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram. I'm not sure if their accounts are linked or not. Maybe you can have an Instagram account and that means you have a Facebook account. I'm not sure. Maybe, I think so. Anyways, but you can have a TikTok account. And then what you would do is you would then go on your set account, your ad account, whatever you want to call it.

and you would just like ads, but you'd have to like ads that you want to target. So if I'm wanted to look at things related to home, sustainability and I don't know, home storage and nature, I would like ads that related to all those topics from small businesses. That's a, that's a key key.

thing. If you're liking ads from North Face and

I don't know, like home decor or...

Really blanking out. I don't know storage. I mean maybe like Home Depot Home Depot to storage Costco to storage If you're liking ads from these big companies, you're not gonna get the same traction on finding these small businesses because you're not going to compete with these large companies obviously So you don't want to like any of their posts You what you want to do is you want to like you want to share and you want to copy the link? so

It tells the algorithm that you like this post so much, you shared it with your friends on the platform and you can just share it to your own account, your personal account if you have one, if not, I don't know. I think you could share it to yourself on TikTok. I don't know if you could do that on Instagram. You'll share it to yourself. You copy the link. That's important too, because you tell the algorithm you like the post, you like it so much you can share it with someone else on the platform and you liked it so much that you shared it with someone else that doesn't even have the app.

And that really boosts those types of posts to you as a user. And those things are being curated to you where it allows you to find products right there. And you're able to check out what company is offering these products. How is their website? How are they as they're running? And what is doing well and what's not doing well? Because...

Once you get to that realm of these kind of ad, all these ads, you will see ads that are doing well. You'll see ads that aren't doing well. And from there, you can kind of see and kind of see the trend ish. I wouldn't say trend, but what you what you see is is pretty much all the ads. I mean, it depends on how much time you spend on there. I mean, you're not going to see all the ads forever, but.

that's something that you could do for organic product research. And you're like, wow, that sounds like a lot of work and doesn't sound that interesting or fun. I can agree with you there. It is not easy to do that and sit on this mind numbing, just scroll doom of just scrolling through these ads and just nonstop ads. It's just, it's mind numbing.

but is an important work that I am willing to do and sacrifice myself. I'll take one for the team. And I think one of the biggest challenges I've had with doing this organic product research is one, when I was in Mexico City, living in Mexico City for one month, I got into a good rhythm of doing it because Mexico City doesn't have the strongest noise ordinances. So when I say Mexico City, I mean like Mexico City, Mexico, like the capital of Mexico.

I was living in La Cundessa and there's a lot of parties and people driving and it was just, it's just loud. It's hard to sleep, especially when you're in an old building. So what I was doing is I was, instead of staying up either doing nothing or I was like, okay, I'll just do product research. That's fine and all, but since I'm in Mexico, the ads were different than what it is in the U S so I could have set up a VPN or done all that, but I didn't. It is what it is.

That being said, the ads were in Spanish most of the time or in English. So they weren't as useful as it would have been if I was in America. But I prepared my account, the algorithm to be ready when I'm ready to pick things up. And then the second part was I got really sick during my travels in Mexico City. I came there sick, left there sick, unfortunately. So I think I was only well for one weekend. So the first week I was there.

I was sick. I think I was good the second week, the third week. I think I started to get sick again. The fourth week I had a fever and had to get back on antibiotics and it took me a long time to get well, probably three months. So I've been doing all these podcasts, very sick and trying not to cough or...

get all sniffly or blow my nose, all these other things. And so like maybe five episodes ago, I'm absolutely struggling to get through the episode. It was brutal. Everything hurt. My body's all achy and I just got through it. So it makes other episodes really easy, though, like tonight. Super late. I'm exhausted. I might have some some slip ups because I'm just just tired. But.

That being said, it's so much easier now than it was before. Okay, so I was in Mexico City. I had ads in Spanish and in things that related to Mexicans, which is in my target market, so the ads weren't as useful, but.

I got the account ready for when I came back to America. I haven't worked on it since because, well, I've been really sick. So I lost 20 pounds. I'm trying to get back into it.

But I am ready now to take on the challenge.

And I think one of the biggest things is, you know, you want to look for a winning ad, you want to look for a product, and you want to look for kind of what is your niche, right? Like maybe at first you could attack everything, like the whole market. And there might be a competitor, say that...

Let's see.

Maybe you have those little rings that you have and you can look at them, there's a picture in them. Maybe your competitor or your potential competitor is selling them for dogs. And so when your, I don't know, when your pet owner or friend has a dog, you get them a photo, you sneak a photo with your friend and then take it and send it in to.

the company and the company brings back, sends you back a ring with a photo of your friend and their dog and they surprise them with it and it's a video, blah, blah, blah. And that's their ad. You could do the same thing but switch it with someone else or something else. So instead of a dog, it could be maybe you do it for your art friend or relationships. And so you can have the same,

idea different application. And instead of doing dogs, you could do relationships, you could do art, you could do, I don't know, home products, not home products, home projects with someone. I'm not sure you can take whatever approach you want, as long as it's not the same exact approach as someone else. But if you could kind of take their formula, their secret sauce, and then just reapply it to yourself and

switch to a little switcheroo and some cut and chopping, you can find a winning product with a kind of somewhat of a winning formula for ads that people resonate with and go from there. So I think organic ad research is a great way to go about figuring out whether you want.

do a product or not. And then when you want to look deeper, I would use one of those tools earlier, like a Helium 8 or a Jungle Scout to kind of get a better idea. Because it's not just a great product, it's having great ideas, having something that reaches out to a customer and has a good call to action, great marketing, knowing the numbers and making sure the prices make sense.

and then building a brand. Because you don't want to offer a product. Products aren't sustainable, right? Products could be replaced by a new technology. They can become obsolete by having a big business come in and offer the same product at a substantially lower price, and you're gone. The only thing that is sustainable is building a brand. And that's the reason why companies spend billions a year on

their brand recognition is brands stay around. So the idea is long -term, you find a product that's not only winning, not only can you have a great call to action, the numbers make sense, but can you turn this product into a brand? And that right there is the key question. If you ask yourself, okay, do I have a great idea? Do it.

Can I create a good call to action? Can this product with these numbers make sense for our business? And then the last question that's most important is can I turn this product into a brand? Can I make a brand out of this product? If the answer is no, then you know your answer.

I can't wait to see how this all plays out. I'm sure it'll be a great learning experience, however it does. But if you have a comment about this conversation or you wanna share a little bit of your knowledge related to e -commerce, then please leave me a comment on YouTube or I guess you could leave them on Spotify. I'm not sure, I still looking into that. I haven't got to it yet. But remember, this is...

a marathon, you know, building a business takes time. And I'm trying to share my real time learning with you. And so I'm learning while you're learning. That being said, if you have any go -to product research methods, please share them and I'll share them with the group in the next episode. I'll check the comments and you guys are still saving.

up your comments for the podcast. I haven't got any new comments for I think three weeks now. So I'm sure someone's got a bundle of comments somewhere waiting to strike in the unknown world of the internet. But if you if you have any comments or you want to leave a review, please do so. And once again, see you next week. See you. Bye. Have a great day.