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I Built a 7-Figure Amazon Brand… So Why Start an Amazon Agency?
47 Plays2 days ago
If my Amazon brand is already successful, why start an agency?!
That’s the question I get asked ALL the time... and I get it.
In this episode, I’m sharing the real reason behind the decision to launch my Amazon agency, Trivium.
I still have my supplement brand on Amazon, and it's doing great.
Let's get that out of the way..
Most people wait for permission. They ask endless questions. They overanalyze.
I took the shot. I failed. I learned. I built something better.
Back in 2019, I trusted the wrong software, ruined my Amazon account, and had no one to turn to.
Agencies treated my brand like just another number.
Softwares Sucked. Agencies sucked. Gurus weren’t helping. I was stuck.
So, I became the solution.
I became an Amazon EXPERT out of desperation to make my own brand work.
People constantly asked me for help. So I did.
I built Trivium Group with one mission: relentless execution and extreme ownership.
No excuses. Just results.
We over-communicate. We update clients on every metric. We build strategies, not just run ads. We treat your business like OUR business.
Now? Clients go from zero to $1M+/month on Amazon. They quit their jobs. They scale like never before.
If you want to transform your Amazon business, stop waiting. Let's work together: https://hubs.la/Q03dy2Tt0
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Transcript
Introduction: Starting an Agency
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the Amazon Blueprint Podcast.
00:00:05
Speaker
If you're so good at Amazon, why do you have an agency? Why not just do it for your own brand? Let me tell you in a little bit of a story time. So, it was back in 2018, I started my supplement brand. it's actually a conversation with my dad on vacation, which ended up putting me in this path of starting a supplement brand, not even on Amazon, just a supplement brand.
00:00:22
Speaker
I tried to get it in stores and in gyms and all that kind of stuff. It failed miserably. I was also just an engineer, right? It wasn't like I had any entrepreneurship or sales or any sort of experience. And so why did I decide to put it up on Amazon was very simple. I was at an MMA fight where I sponsored a little booth for free because my friend hooked me up and everyone asked, where can I buy your product? And we lied and said, it's going to be up on Amazon soon.
00:00:46
Speaker
And so I had to figure it out. And so that's essentially the reason that I got on Amazon. And then I looked online
Challenges on Amazon and Learning Process
00:00:52
Speaker
everywhere. I looked at every single blog article, every single video, every single podcast, every single thing that you can think of how to get on Amazon.
00:00:59
Speaker
And there was no good information. Every piece of information back then was so bad, very misguiding. So I eventually called Amazon and they helped me like start a seller central account. And then I was like, okay, cool.
00:01:09
Speaker
How do i even get this stuff to sell on Amazon, amazon all this stuff? And so it was a lot of like, you know, listening to different random people. I was in Sam Brax's group, whatever. People would give me information and I would try it. It would actually be bad information.
00:01:22
Speaker
But here's the one thing that I did better than everyone else. is I was okay failing. So I did the thing, tested it, failed. Did the thing, tested, failed. Did the thing, tested, failed. And so I did so much in such a little amount of time and I learned from every single mistake. And this kind of an MMA fighter mentality, right? It's like, as an MMA fighter, the coach teaches you exactly how to take the shot, exactly how to do the choke.
00:01:43
Speaker
However, once you do it live in training, then you learn like, oh, I took the shot and the guy choked me out. I took the shot and he blocked it. I took the shot and this. And so you never actually get better or move forward without taking the shot and getting choked and beat up and all this stuff.
00:01:57
Speaker
And then you just get better and better and better and better until you, and you keep moving forward. So it's fail fast and fail forward. And that was my mindset. And so I kept making every single mistake under the sun and I started learning a little bit better, a little bit better,
Community Engagement and PPC Mastery
00:02:09
Speaker
a little bit better. And I was in Samar Brax's Facebook group and a couple other Facebook groups. And so six months in, I was actually doing $20,000 a month in revenue.
00:02:16
Speaker
And by then, like I had tried so many different things. I tried reaching out to agencies to run my PPC. This Fiverr guy ran it for three days, took my spend from, it was like $50 a day to $250 a day. My sales tanked because I don't know what the hell he was doing. I kicked him out. I had a software company. I'm not going to mention the name, but you know, they said we have AI and we have machine learning and all this stuff. I'm sure you can figure out which one back then, right? 2019. put it on my account, ruined the whole account. I still remember to this day, I was visiting my friend in Wisconsin and I activated the software like a day before. Got on the flight, got there, you know, it was my first night there, slept,
00:02:53
Speaker
and woke up, and I woke up in the morning as usual, the first thing I do is check my sales, and oh my God, like it was destruction. My sales were down, my spend was like three times what it was, and so I immediately like just cut that software out. I said like, it's crazy that in the first week, this is what it's doing.
00:03:08
Speaker
And so, you know, i made every single mistake under the sun, and six months in, I wasn't a guru or anything. I just, you know, i was an experienced guy that had a ton of battle scars. And in the Facebook groups, people were asking questions and they were asking questions like, what's an auto campaign? Or like, how many keywords should I have in a campaign? How do I do this on the product detail page?
00:03:24
Speaker
And I was just answering questions, answering. And I'm like, I'm not telling you what's right or wrong. This is what I tried and this is what worked. And so slowly I started to make a little bit of a name for myself in the Facebook groups. And people are like, we want more from Mina, we want more from Mina. And so Samar Brax got me on a live. And so I did a live with his group. And in that group, you know I talked about a lot of like Amazon PPC stuff and everyone really loved it. And this was because, you know, I've just been burned by, you know, this agency. I've been burned by this freelancer. I've been burned by software. And I'm like, I have to learn PPC. I refuse not to learn. First of all, guys, I graduated top of my class as a chemical engineer.
00:03:57
Speaker
I graduated top of my class and my master's in industrial engineer. Like I know I'm incredibly intelligent. There's no one in the world that's going to figure this shit out better than me. Right. And so I had to just stop being a bitch basically and say like, Oh, like this agency is going to do it. I don't know. PPC. It's so hard. It's so difficult. I said, dude,
00:04:12
Speaker
Stop being a bitch like fucking learn it. I'm the smartest guy I know you know around me right I graduated top my class back then right I'm sure I know much smarter people now But I didn't know anyone right that can help me so I'm like I'm just gonna figure this shit out It was to a point where six months in the day that I got fired from my job I was driving to a conference in New York City So I used to live in Connecticut was driving to a conference in New York City There was Casper the mattress company there. They were a keynote speaker and this was an Amazon's AWS offices And they had all these experts like Amazon catalog expert from Seattle, you know, Amazon PPC expert, the PPC expert was drinking beer and I waited in line, walked up to her and said, Hey, my name's Mina. Nice to meet you. I have some questions.
00:04:47
Speaker
Can I tell you my Amazon PPC strategy? And you tell me like what you think I'm doing wrong or what should I do differently? She was like, sure. And then I break it down. I'm like, okay, this is how I do a keyword research. And then I launched these campaigns and then I optimize them. It's like this. And then I optimize the placement.
00:05:00
Speaker
And at the end of it, like her jaw was just like dropped and she was like, And I'm like, okay, cool, so like what do you think I should do? and she's like, um you know, maybe like go broader. And I said, go broader? That was literally her answer, go broader. like That was the Amazon PPC person.
00:05:13
Speaker
So i was like, okay, I'm on my own. like No one's coming to save me, I have to figure this shit out. So anyways, fast forward, you know like I got fired from my company, so I pack up all my shit, go to
Teaching and Recognition During COVID
00:05:24
Speaker
Egypt.
00:05:24
Speaker
And while I'm in Egypt in my grandma's house, I'm like, you know what? People keep asking me all these PPC questions. And so let me just break it down. And by the way, to give you some context, I was a tutor and a teaching assistant and assistant professor for over 10 years at this point. And so I have extensive amount of like experience teaching people, you know, chemical engineering, heat transfer, mass transfer. So I'm really good at teaching. And so I'm like, let me break it down into like the fundamentals. What is an auto campaign? What is a broad? What is a phrase? What is an exact? How many keywords per campaign?
00:05:52
Speaker
How do you launch? How do you do keyword research? What is a product targeting campaign? How do you optimize bids? How do you do them regular? How do you do them in a bulk sheet? What is a search term report? How do you extract keywords from You know what i mean? All of this stuff just broken down in a very nice level. And that's when like, okay, yo, Mina's the PPC guy. That's like,
00:06:08
Speaker
you know, when I got my first start. And so that was the beginning of it. And then from there, people started hitting me up and it was actually a mix of both. Like, so four months later, this is now December 2019. I moved to LA. I had done one live with Samer and, you know, I saw some people in the industry doing podcasts and I said, you know what? I want to do these podcasts. I want to show up there and I want to give people all of my knowledge so they don't make all the mistakes that I made. You know, this is just kind of me giving. I had no agency. I was barely doing consulting, you know, a few hours here, a few hours there, nothing really serious.
00:06:36
Speaker
So I had nothing to sell. So i would get on these podcasts. I would say, listen, like, this is my story. I can give you my story and I can just share with you every single thing that I've learned about PPC, step-by-step, all this stuff. And so I would get on one-by-one podcast after podcast after podcast, and then people loved it. And by the way, this is now 2020.
00:06:53
Speaker
COVID has just hit and so every single week I'm doing a podcast. Obviously everyone's at home watching it and I still have nothing to sell. Fast forward to August, September of 2020. Now I'd moved to a new place. I remember this distinctly. My friend hits me up and she says, hey, someone, this really big seller is looking for the best Amazon PPC guy I recommended you. I'm like, okay, cool. Connect me. Like, let's see what it's about. This guy, Tomer Rabinovich, which is a good friend and and a master at Amazon, interviews me and says,
00:07:21
Speaker
Tell me everything you know about PPC. Tell me your strategy. So I lay it all out for him. He likes it. He goes and he talks to the company that he's consulting, which turns out to be this massive $300 million dollars aggregator. They raised $300 million dollars and they were now acquiring brands. They wanted me to train their in-house team because they did not want to keep hiring agencies, which makes a lot of sense when you're that big.
00:07:40
Speaker
Why not have your own in-house team? So they interviewed me again, loved me, but they said, listen, like show us that you're actually good, run one of our brands. So I said, oh okay, I could do this. I'll i'll run a brand.
00:07:50
Speaker
And back then it was just me and then my VA that I hired back in July of 2019. And then my PPC manager that I hired two months prior to that conversation. So it's not like I really had a team, but I knew I could direct someone to do the work. So I get on, I take over this brand and four months later, So their head of e-commerce gets on a call with me and says, let me show you this.
00:08:08
Speaker
And he shows me my performance versus six other agencies they were secretly testing me against. And he's like, you outperformed everyone, these big agencies by 30%. And I was like, okay, that's pretty awesome. You know, he's like, okay, cool. Move forward, train the team, blah, blah, blah. You know, I got the proposal, all that kind of stuff. So by then, this is like, we're talking now January, February, 2021. And at that point, remember, I've been on every single podcast and nonstop people have been hitting me up. Mina, I wish you had an agency. Please run my stuff. Like I'll pay you money. Like I've been burned by everyone. None of my PPC is working. And I'm like, no, it's just me and one PPC employee and I have my own brand. That's it. Like that's all I'm focused
Founding and Expanding Trivium
00:08:46
Speaker
on. And so after all of that, like,
00:08:48
Speaker
you know, a year pretty much of people hitting me up, wanting me to do this. And then them telling me that I outperformed the six best agencies, I was like, okay, this is a sign, like I should do this. And so I said, you know, let me take a handful of clients and see how it goes.
00:09:01
Speaker
Maybe I'm gonna hate my life, like after dealing with clients. but I took, I started taking on clients and one after the next, after the next is like positive experience, positive experience, positive experience. it's like, oh my God, like we love your work. We love how detailed you are. We love the communication.
00:09:15
Speaker
And to me, it was simple. Like I have worked with the agencies before and I knew what's what's bad. Like communication is terrible. Strategy is not clear. They're not watching the account daily. They're not giving me daily updates. I feel like it's an external thing and I always have to chase them. And so when I created Trivium, my agency, I was like, you're never gonna chase us. You're actually gonna hate how much we update you. We're gonna update you daily on every single metric. We're gonna give you reports.
00:09:37
Speaker
We're gonna give you week over week reports. We're gonna give you inventory reports. We're gonna give you so much that you're gonna feel guilty. You're gonna feel like we know your business better than you know your business. That was my mission. My mission was to create a team that felt like it was inside your own business. It wasn't an external agency.
00:09:52
Speaker
and you know communication was top tier. The strategy was top tier and it was clear we were aligned on the same goals. And you know you got every report you can think of. The analytics, it wasn't just like, oh here's CTR, CVR, ACOS, TACOS.
00:10:04
Speaker
What does the all that mean? ACOS, TACOS, CVR. It doesn't mean anything. It was more like, hey, here's how your CTR changed. This is what it could mean. This is potentially why. This is what we're gonna test. And so it was more of a, here's the analytics, here's a story and explanation of the analytics, and you know let's work together on on a strategy and future actions. And so when I created Trivium, that's how it started. It started as just a PPC agency. It's now turned into a full service agency. We have Amazon PPC, we have Amazon DSP, we have creatives.
00:10:33
Speaker
We have all these other services, SEO, catalog management, anything you can think of literally from the time inventory hits Amazon until it gets sold to the customer, every service possible that you need, we now have.
00:10:43
Speaker
And it was only out of necessity. So I started as PPC because that's what everyone wanted, right? And then we kept running into the issue of like, hey, I'm doing your PPC as perfectly as possible, but your creative suck, right? Your images are so terrible. They're not selling anything. They're overwhelming. There's too much text. It's all over the place. So what do you want me to do? Like people don't wanna buy your product.
00:11:03
Speaker
And so we created a creative division. And in that creative division, it was again, like, what is the best company in the world doing? How do we match or beat it? You know, and it and it was more like, okay, you come in, we have a creative director. They look at your listing. They look at the one-star reviews, the five-star reviews. They look at your competitors.
00:11:19
Speaker
They see who are the top listings. How do they look? Do you have a brand guide? Can we create you a brand guide? You know, all of these things. And then they create the listing images based on why is this product better than everyone else? What's the features? What's the benefits? You know, what are the one stars? Like, oh, we don't have any of the bad stuff.
00:11:33
Speaker
We have all of the good stuff. This is how your life is gonna become better after you buy the product. And so the images just sell sell, sell, sell, very quick infographic, not a lot of text. And so that's how we've approached creatives. And then we moved on to, okay, DSP. How's everyone doing DSP?
00:11:48
Speaker
zero transparency. They're like, oh you know, we spent 10K and we made 8X row as 80K. But I'm like, but ever since we started, we added 10K in spend and there's maybe 15K more in sales. How are you telling me you generated in DSP sales? It does not make any sense. And it's because there's all these like things in DSP, like in the back end that you could do to actually say like, oh, I showed an ad on a page even though like there's already sponsored product ad, there's already an organic ranking. It's like, oh, I showed the ad on this page, so I'm gonna take the credit. And DSP is not taking all the credit. And I'm like, that makes no sense. That makes no sense. And so I deep dove so hard into it. And then I brought on Sam Lee, who built Thrasio, you know, the billion dollar company,
00:12:28
Speaker
is like entire DSP 300 brands. And we came up with a really, really, really strong strategy where you know we start with like a loyalty and getting people who purchased but didn't repurchase and then retargeting and then competitor targeting and then complimentary product targeting. Always making sure that we're always excluding everyone who's been in contact with us so we're not double dipping into the same audience. So we're actually truly bringing people who've never seen the product to see us and then retargeting them until they convert and then bringing them back again. So that's kind of the approach that we've taken with
Client Success and Future Opportunities
00:12:58
Speaker
Trivium. And so what makes Trivium different? And the biggest difference is you're not just hiring an agency, you're hiring a team that plugs into your company and you treat them just like an in-house team. You treat them just like your employees.
00:13:08
Speaker
You talk to them daily. They communicate with you daily. We're in a Slack channel together. Every single day you get daily updates. There's weekly or bi-weekly strategy calls. You hop on a call, let's strategize, let's come up with ideas. Can we try this? Can we drink this?
00:13:21
Speaker
Can we test that? Whatever. And then we document all that. put it in like Canvas, which is like kind of a notes pad in the Slack channel, and then let's track it and let's make sure that these things are happening. Let's communicate what is the data telling us.
00:13:32
Speaker
And so if I'm thinking like, okay, Mina, MMA nutrition, you're a supplement brand, you're building this you know big supplement brand, you wanna build an in-house team, what does that look like? Well, I need a senior strategy guy, right? Because a senior strategy guy, he's not doing you know tedious bullshit optimizing bids, he's doing strategy because he's super smart, he or she.
00:13:49
Speaker
right and then under him or her there's gonna be like a ppc manager that's doing all the little ppc tedious work like launch a campaign optimize a bit track this rank do this you know all this little small stuff that i used to do do myself i know right then there's gonna be a catalog manager someone who's like hey merge my listing split my listing upload this new image do me an a b test like all these little you know non-ppc bullshit stuff on the side right like respond to this customer message And then you're gonna have an analyst and that analyst, all they're doing is they're getting the data and they're making it look nice and presentable and then saying, hey, here's the data, nice presentable for you, strategist, please interpret it.
00:14:25
Speaker
And so that is a comprehensive team and that's what we've built. We've built pods of comprehensive teams that just plug into your business and they can provide the strategy, they can provide the actual work, they can provide all of that. And so in conclusion,
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, I've basically been my own customer and I've built something that I wanted for my own brand and I'm sharing it with everyone. And our core values is 1% better every day, you know, progress over perfection, failing fast and failing forward and extreme ownership and accountability. And so I'm adopting the mindset that I took when I first started on Amazon and how I learned and i how I got so, so, so good at Amazon by testing, testing, testing, doing, doing, improving, improving and putting that and and building a relentless team. Like I always tell my team, I'm like, I'm building the 300 Spartans.
00:15:07
Speaker
You're either that or you're out of the company. And that's literally the ruthless leadership and the ruthless mentality that I have in the company. I don't want everyone in the company. I don't care. I don't want to be a welcoming place.
00:15:18
Speaker
And that's how the UFC is. You know, the UFC has the top of the top fighters and, you know, only the the top are going to make it. Everyone else, unfortunately, is just not the place for them. And, you know, one of the most beautiful things about, you know, owning this agency and working with so many brand founders You know, we've worked with Hilary Duff, right? And we've worked with NeuroGum and we've worked with Primal Queen that literally went from zero to four million a month in the course of like 11 months, right? And we've worked with brands that like started out from nothing. They came to me, they're like, Mina, I'm just starting out on Amazon. I don't know what to do. And we've guided them through the entire process of creating their listings and getting up on Amazon and launched and all that kind of stuff. And so it's been amazing because, you know, you've seen the big people come back and say, wow, like I love your work. And you've seen the people that were like me and literally started at nothing. also come back and saying, wow, you've changed my life. And I remember distinctly one client, Joe, that we took him from zero to a million a month. And I remember you know the day that he called me and he said, dude, like thank you so much.
00:16:12
Speaker
I've officially quit my job. I can't believe you know we've come this far. And obviously a lot of it falls on him as the the owner of the business. I'm sure he's working relentlessly, you know he's he's fighting every single day, but to be able to partner and work with brands like this and see the success and see them, you know others like go to 7 million a month, 8 million a month like NeuroGum, you know, these brands that started off and now are like, people are quitting their jobs and all that kind of stuff.
00:16:35
Speaker
It's really amazing and it's very rewarding. And if you guys are interested in working with us, if you're interested in, you know, a free consultation or a strategy or an audit, or if you just want free resources, or if you want consulting, you know, we have Trivium Tribe, right? For the people who can't afford really much, it's 200 bucks a month and you're in there with me, James, our consultant, the rest of our team, we share everything. We share all of our tools, all of templates.
00:16:56
Speaker
I'm not here to gatekeep any secret information, right? We sell the execution. I'm selling you a team. I'm selling you a well-oiled machine. I can give you all the secrets. If I had all the secrets back in 2018, it's not like that much would have changed.
00:17:07
Speaker
Like, yes, I would have been a little bit further along, but eventually I would have had to delegate and give it to a team. all right, guys, if you like this podcast, make sure to let me know, subscribe to the podcast, and go check out the YouTube channel, Mina Elias. I put out so much fire content.
00:17:20
Speaker
And also, if you need my team to come in and do an audit and kind of give you a breakdown of here's everything you need to do to improve your listing from a click-through rate conversion rate standpoint, do a full audit on your ads, all that kind of stuff, completely for free, and deliver that report to you, go to our website, triviumco.com, and click get a free audit.
00:17:38
Speaker
All right, guys, see you in the next one.