678: $300k Worth of BBQ Rub on the Side

23:29It's like, I'll give it a try. Right. And so it seems, even though it's somewhat commoditized, right, you can get this stuff at any grocery store, but it's like, that's that story and that branding and the positioning and like the interrupt factor. Oh, I saw this on Facebook. I saw this on YouTube where it's maybe less price sensitive than you might think. Yeah. I mean, they're at the grocery store and they're comparing, okay, this one's five, this one's 10, this one's 20. Oh, I'm going to get the five, I want to try it. And that's just a commoditized type thing. Whereas our seasoning, you know, not saying that there's nothing special about the seasoning at the grocery store, but there is a lot of love behind what we do and the stories that, I mean, I'm talking to By the way, my rub goes out to an older demographic.

24:08And it's funny because where I get my stories comes from an older demographic. I got, you know, the pit match guy I was talking to. He's an older gentleman. There's a female I talked to and she's older as well. And I go and I grab their stories. I grab that. People who love to cook. And then I use that. If I was just trying to push seasoning, I wouldn't do that. Like, I care about this and these people. And they talk to me and there's a love there that I then transfer to the landing page. That's much different than me just putting an ad out about a seasoning. I think there's more behind what we do.

24:40And when the reader reads that, it's like when people go to the movies, they're going to the movies to check out. There's nothing going on. That's a lot of people's way of being present and checking out, right? So now if I give you a story, and it happens to be about seasoning, but I've allowed you to check out and get immersed into something, and then you see this thing, you're much more receptive to paying whatever the price is because now it's not a$5,$10, or$20 thing. It's this really cool story about this really cool product. Changes the game. Here's one thing that kind of surprised me because I've seen so many direct-to-consumer brands go this way.

25:15The default is the subscription. I'll send you another thing every month. Click here to sign up. And it's like, timeout. I don't know if I want it. I haven't even tried it yet. But it's like, everybody seems to be going that way. And I was kind of surprised, especially since it's like a replenishable type of thing. You're going to, if you use it, if you like it, you're going to run out. You're going to need to order more. I was a little bit surprised not to see that like checkbox for the recurring, you know, subscribe and save type of thing here. I thought about that, Nick, and I was like, man, really, this is, it's a lot of seasoning.

25:45I mean, if you're a heavy user, you're probably using two cans. I mean, if you're a barbecue pit master guy, whatever, okay, different, but your everyday person who's buying this, maybe one a year. I'm lucky if they get two. Yeah. It's just so what I'm going to send you seasoning every every three months. It's going to stack up. No, I'm going to sell it to you. I'm also going to send you weekly emails to let you know that I'm still here. So when you decide to buy, you can do it. But again, this thing is there is a very human component behind what we do. I at least I believe. And I think that the way we approach it, avoiding the subscription thing is just more of a is an example of that human approach.

26:22All right. That's fair. We're going to do the follow-up, but we're not going to force you to commit to doing this subscription thing. I wouldn't want to buy all that seasoning. What am I going to do with all that seasoning? It doesn't make any sense. And so, yeah. Okay. Going back to the Facebook ads, was there a target cost of acquisition that you'd like to be in? And how often do you have to rotate the copy? Or is it just like, we're running this on Evergreen? Some of the campaigns run three, four, five months at a time, depending. it is hard to get a target CPA. A target CPA, for those who don't know, is target cost per acquisition, right?

26:52So you want to say, hey, I want to sell this thing. I want this to cost me no more than$5 in advertisement for everything I sell. That's harder to do nowadays. Back in the day, before cookies and this, and when consumer behavior was a little more simple, you could get a pretty decent target CPA. You could be like, yeah, it's costing me about five bucks to sell this thing. Nowadays, the consumer is smart. We're all smart. Like, I'll give you a quick story. We had Windows installed in my house a year or two ago, which were way more expensive than I thought Windows should be. We got them installed in our house, but this is the thing.

27:29I saw an ad on Facebook. I then forwarded it to my wife. My wife goes to their website, comes back and talks to me, and then she calls them again, I think, through their PPC, their pay-per-click, their Google Ads. so what happens is their google ads gets credit for that sell but where did it start it started back with me with facebook so with with that what i what i mean by that is like i can't trust the cp the cpa and facebook might be sky like might be super high but if i'm selling a lot of products on the back end well they might have saw the ad on facebook but they watched youtube yeah they had to come from somewhere yeah they saw yeah they saw it on facebook then went to my site or they went to Amazon or something like that.

28:12And so I have to kind of get a feel for it as much as a, it's not as much as the science is like it used to be. Okay. Yeah. There's as much as we'd like to be able to track down to the, down to the dollar with all these attribution models there, it sounds like there may be a little bit of a gray area and you have to kind of trust the bottom line of what, what sold, what was our ad spend? They had to come from somewhere. They had to find that initial awareness somewhere and it must be working even if it's not you know they didn't they didn't follow the funnel in the same session yeah i mean and they're so they do have these other attribution tools like i think high rose and triple well they're supposed to code to me they don't they're not that great to me at the end of the day this is just for me i'm not saying that for everybody but just for me it's what nick just said where i'm just it has to come from somewhere let me see what's happening at the bottom line what am i spending on marketing total.

29:01What are my top line sales total? Let me do my best to try to figure out what's really working as best as I can. But it comes down to having a feel, which you get by doing this over time. Okay. Now, are you shipping these initial orders out of your spare bedroom, out of the garage? Is there a logistics partner? All of a sudden, if we're talking about 5 ,000 units, licking and sticking and going to the post office, it's like, this is starting to get to be another, a whole nother job. Yeah. My, my living room was real fragrant there for a while. Uh, really fragrant. And when I first started doing this, it was just me and, and, and my office and I would have two days a week, which I didn't have those two days to be doing this, but it was two days.

29:44I started off really heavy. So it'd be like two full days of me just doing it all. Like I was like, cause I got hit. It kind of, it was like an, oh my gosh moment where it just a lot came in once that art, my very first article worked way better than I thought it would. And then all of a sudden I have all these orders. And so now I'm like, oh crap, I have to do all these orders. And two days a week of just doing orders. And as time went on, I ended up, my grandma lives down the road. Thank goodness. She has a big shed. I could put an AC unit in. So now I put all the product and everything and all my materials in that shed, the AC and all that's good to go.

30:17And then I have a pool house slash workout room in my backyard. And I have, it was two employees, actually three employees. But one of the employees comes once to twice a week, depending on the workload. And she'll go in the pool house and she has everything she needs out there. And she's just, we do all that in the pool house. USPS comes and picks it up and I'm done. All right. We're not promising overnight shipping. We're going to process these a couple of days a week. You get it when you get it. You mentioned Amazon. So I do want to talk about that as a distribution channel, as a place to potentially find people who, yeah, they discovered you through YouTube and they're used to shopping on Amazon, so they may find you over there.

30:57Yeah. Or through potentially Amazon directly if they're looking for unique gifts or barbecue seasoning or something directly on Amazon. Can you talk to me about that as a sales channel? Yeah, absolutely. I was against it at first. For those who don't know, when you ship on Amazon, you don't keep your data. What do I mean by that? That means that you don't know the person's email. You don't know their phone number. I don't know if you even get their address. I don't remember. But point being is if you buy from my store, if Nick comes to my store and he buys, I get all Nick's information, not just like random information, good information, like his real name, real phone number, a real email because he just bought something.

31:35So he wants to track it. So I get a real email address and I get his physical address. This is quality data, which is a whole nother game, whole nother conversation. So I get that. When you go to Amazon, you get none of that. Amazon keeps that. Yeah, it's Amazon's customer, not your customer. Exactly. I'm helping Amazon get data and nowadays data is gold. And so I'm helping Amazon get all the data, keep all of it. And I just sell. So I was against it, but I had to, I was like, you know what? People are trust Amazon. They may not trust me, even though I have all the social proof. Let me put this on Amazon.

32:06So I put it on Amazon and man, it's sold. Like people just trust Amazon. So I was like, oh gosh, the people are really buying it. Yeah. Yeah. Like I see like hundreds of reviews on the listing. Yeah. People, it's Amazon. They trust it. So I had to go there at But at the expense of data, it helps with the top line. So I just had to go there. And here's the thing. With Amazon, I don't play the whole, let me compete with other barbecue seasonings and barbecue brands and play the organic and the SEO. I had my site optimized on Amazon. The first time I threw it up there, it was a really weak looking listing.

32:40And then eventually I was like, oh, let me look like a professional. And so we did it. And it looks like a professional listing now, at least as professionals I can pay for. but we we did that and like i said man it it did really really well what's your take on on this because we've seen more people go your direction versus starting on amazon we see more and more people try and build up their own traffic sources through their own shopify powered store and then you know that a certain percentage of people are going to be looking for it on it can i just get it on amazon like they already have my checkout information can i just click the one one click thing do you find there's some value in the algorithm when you're like driving your own traffic to a certain extent?

33:19Absolutely. I think that I'm playing the whole like Amazon SEO. When I say SEO guys, it starts engine optimization. So I'm trying to rank organically on like if somebody typed in barbecue rub, there's a game you play to get you at the very top. I don't want, I don't feel like playing all that, that playing the game. I don't feel like advertising on Amazon. I don't even do the whole fulfillment by Amazon because they take a lot of your money. If I do the advertising and fulfillment by Amazon, my margins shrink. So I was like, forget it. What I'll do is do all my advertising off that platform. And I only use Amazon when somebody wants to buy.

33:49If somebody finds me on Amazon, they've probably made their decision already. Okay. And that's what I wanted. So the conversion rate on those listing clicks are super high because they already know what they are looking for. And so you're doing fulfillment by merchant, like somebody will collect the order and then you'll ship it out. Absolutely. Yeah. Otherwise, yeah, if they're warehousing it, if you're doing their ad platform, like all this stuff, and all of a sudden those margins get real, real narrow. Amazon's making money. no matter what your margins are. Amazon's so dirty, Nick. And what they'll do too is like, if you have a commodity or something, like say I have this comb, if you're wondering why I have a comb, it's from my beard, not from my head, obviously.

34:23But if you have a comb there and Amazon sees that you're selling a ton of this comb, what does Amazon do? Yeah, the Amazon Basics version. Yeah, they have all your data. They know exactly what you're doing and they have more money than you. So they'll go and just take your product and undercut you. The beautiful thing about this, and so you have to be cognizant, man. Amazon can, they'll play that game where you could have your Amazon barbecue rub, but it's not going to sell unless you, because you're not doing what I'm doing, which is putting something else behind it. More with Chris in just a moment, including the creative way he increases his average order size and the side side hustle he expects to eventually overtake the barbecue rub e-commerce part of the business.

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37:27Yeah. You have control over the pricing too. So you can kind of match, make sure it's the same pricing. Absolutely. Can I hit on one thing about pricing if you don't mind? Yeah, go ahead. If you go on my site, you'll see that there's, um, I'm not just giving people seasoning. The seasoning is expensive. There's some items where it's a, what is it? A premium. So the premium being like you buy this seasoning, you get this thing for free. My seasoning is expensive. I get it. And so what I did was I would work with talking about MOQs. I would work with like an Alibaba or somebody like that who sells wholesale.

38:00This is prior to all the terror stuff, by the way. So I'm not sure what the prices are now, but back in the day, I could like get a bunch of barbecue slicers or yeah, I can get a bunch of slicers or barbecue meat, like thawing trays or 50 cal bottle openers, just cool things, depending on if it's a female or male who's buying my stuff that if they went and bought that item alone, it would cost them north of 20 bucks, sometimes over 50, depending on the item. So I go and I buy those and I say, Hey, if you buy five things of seasoning, which lasts you two, three years, if you buy five things of seasoning, you'll get this thing for free, this meat thawing tray, or you buy two things of seasoning, you get this slicer for free.

38:40And then you see that and you're like, oh, the price of this is 30 bucks. But if I just bought the slicer alone, it's 20 bucks. So really this is, it makes sense. I did the premium thing and you can help me kind of like make this point a little better here, Nick, but adding a gift to it, like a free gift, a premium or something helps justify the purchase. If Nick buys something today and it was super expensive and he goes to his wife and it's like, babe, I bought this and it was really expensive. She's like, what the heck? But if Nick's like, hey, babe, I bought this, it was expensive, but we got a free car.

39:08She's going to be like, oh, that was great. So you want to give people an excuse, a reason to not look stupid when they're making a purchase. I think that's a really creative way to increase the average order size where you're like, absolutely. I could just get the, you know, the one pack, but for a little bit more, I could get two plus this free gift or I could get five. I could give some away. Yeah. I think this is a really interesting way to do. I don't know if I've seen anybody doing exactly that on other e-commerce sites like this before. Yeah. Thanks, man. That was exactly what it was. I was like, I need to increase this average order value for this thing to make sense.

39:40And it's a good deal. These slicers and these other things that we give away, those things are expensive, man. And so we just give it to you for free with the seasoning and now it makes more sense to buy the seasoning. Okay. Now, is there all these sitting in the pool house slash warehouse now too? Yeah. Yeah. They're in the warehouse slash pool house. We have most of it in the warehouse. And then we just went, as we move things or things are selling, we just put what we need to in the pool house. And again, the pool house is my workout room and it is quite fragrant. Come out of there, smell like barbecue.

40:11Exactly. The other thing that you touched on was email marketing and sending out kind of a weekly, sometimes story-based, you know, newsletter, so to speak. Is this content on how to smoke better chicken? Like what's, give me an idea of what kind of stuff that you're sending out that can't always be, hey, did you run out yet? Buy more. Yeah. And that's exactly what I was avoiding was, you know, I don't want to send out something like, hey, buy more, buy more because nobody cares about it. Again, I'm thinking about the consumer more than I'm thinking about me when it comes to this. And with the newsletter, this is a way of building a community around a seasoning, which sounds odd, right?

40:48How do you build a community around a seasoning? Well, we do it through our newsletter. And for those who don't know, if you're looking at a side hustle, you know, don't sleep on newsletters. There's platforms out there like Beehive and newsletters are big business. There was one, The Morning Brew, They sold for like 75 million. And then there's smaller ones that sell for a million and smaller ones that sell for 500, 600 ,000. So newsletters are a side hustle if you could build it. And so what I decided was, hey, you know what? We're gonna do a newsletter out of this. It's gonna have a weekly recipe, but it's not just gonna be, hey, here's a cheesecake recipe.

41:18It has nothing to do with the seasoning, but I give them recipes. But if I just sent out recipes about chicken Alfredo or something like that and pointed back to my site, nobody cares. But it's more of the same where it's like, okay, who are these people? these people I know that I can get stories from or whatever. And then I go and I take those stories. I give those to the people, like, here's a story about something that happened last week or whatever it is. And then I give them the actual recipe of what I'm saying or what I'm talking about that week. And then let them go to the site if they want to or not.

41:50It's a cooking newsletter, but really it's an entertainment newsletter, where it's a story about something that happened with our guy Buck that week. And then there's three interesting articles. It's typically articles that we find interesting, something that will entertain people. And then there's a recipe. And it's that format week after week. And what we found, Nick, is that the audience loves it. They email us back saying, hey, this is something that they look forward to weekly. Like they really look forward to it. Something that entertains them. So now, again, it is not just a seasoning. It's a community.

42:21It's a thing of entertainment. It changes. I'm out of that whole commoditized, is it 5, 10, or 20? I'm in a whole new ballgame. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is the newsletter, do you see that becoming a side hustle on a side hustle? Like, is it become its own like barbecue influencer thing that people follow along with whether or not they ever buy the stuff? That's exactly what it's going to be. It's a side hustle on a side hustle. At this point, I did my first advertising two weeks ago, my very first one,$7.20, right? We got to start somewhere though, right? But I'm consistently like Beehive. I like Beehive, the platform, because Beehive will make it easy for your your newsletter to get sponsored.

43:00All you have to do is make sure people want to actually read your newsletter. And so we get high engagement. So now we're getting flooded with sponsorships. My first one was$7.20. All right, you got to start somewhere. And then now I'm starting to figure out, okay, I can start testing how to put sponsorships in here. And there's other ways to monetize a newsletter. So to your point, Nick, it's a side hustle on a side hustle. And to me, I think that I will eventually be more profitable in the newsletter business than I am with the seasoning business. Interesting. Yeah. You can see where it's going.

43:33How many subscribers you have to at this point? Right now we're at 7 ,000. We were as high as 9 ,000. I had 42 ,000 emails at one point. And then I went down to like 15 ,000 that were like somewhat active. And then now on Beehive, since it's so, they really care about people engaging, I keep the list real tight. Like if you don't open my email within 30 days, I'm kicking you off and I'll tell you. And so I keep it real tight because I'd rather have a tighter list with higher engagement than a big list with low engagement. Okay. So Beehive, I assume Shopify is what's running the site. Absolutely.

44:10Any other tools or tech that you swear by here? We run the site on Shopify, use Beehive as a newsletter. I use a lot of, I do a lot of talking with ChatGPT and Claude. These are AI platforms. A lot of idea stuff happening with that. For those who I'm sure at this point, everybody knows about ChatGPT. Some of y 'all might know about Claude, but I don't just go in there and like just come out to ChatGPT and ask it, hey, solve this problem. I really take time to make sure ChatGPT knows exactly how I wanted to act. And not just that, if you're in chat GPT, you know, you go to the top of it. There's certain models that chat GPT has.

44:50And each model does something different. You'll have a basic model. You'll have a model that's good for ideas and research and writing. You'll have a model that's good for coding. I am very, very intentional about the way I'm training it to act. Think about like training a person. I tell them exactly how to act and I give it examples of what I'm looking for. Okay. Right. And then I pick the correct model. I'm looking, so if I'm doing research, ideal stuff, I'll pick the research one at this point, it's 4.5. So I know, I know how I want it to act, I have it in the correct model. And now I start working with it and coming up with ideas.

45:24And here's the thing I've learned about AI. If you are terrible at, let's say writing copy, which is mean writing words to sell yourself, if you're terrible at that and you use AI, it's just going to multiply how terrible you are. All right. That's all it does. But if you have a skill, like something you're good at, and you use AI correctly, it'll multiply your efficacy by 100 times. And so I use it to magnify my strengths. And in some cases, compensate for my weaknesses. But I find much more help when I use it to magnify my strengths. Yeah, but you're right. It's kind of garbage in, garbage out.

46:01But if you can kind of prompt and prime it to act a certain way, it does a really good job of doing that. And again, between, and I'll use, I'll go, I'll have chat GBT open and I'll have Claude open. Claude's another one. And I'll do the, I'll like do the exact same thing to both and get different ideas and different feedback. And I'll kind of compare and contrast that feedback. It's just like helping me, spanning the mind, man. It's really, it's really good. Any other tools or resources that you like? if you are trying to sell something like you don't have stories, you don't know what's going on or whatever.

46:38Reddit is a goldmine, just a goldmine, depending on what you're trying to do. If you're trying to like crowdsource things or figure out what people think, if you, if you're trying to find the story or something for something, I like to go to Reddit. I'll find the subreddit that makes the most sense for what I'm trying to figure out. Then I'll sort it by top comments. Then once you do that, our top posts, you can sort it by top post. And then after you sort it by top post, you can say for the year, for all time, for the last week. So I usually go top post all time or top post for the year. And I start at the top and I look at the posts.

47:14And not only do I look at the posts, I'll open the post up and I'll look at the comments. These are real people. So depending on your niche, let's say you're in the weight loss niche and you sell to females and you find a subreddit that has a bunch of females who are looking to lose weight. and you sort it the way I'm looking at, I'm telling you to sort it and you go there and you read the post and more important, read the comments and the comments that really got a bunch of likes and stuff. You learn a lot. It's crowdsourcing for free. I would pay money for Reddit with the type of stuff that I learned from it.

47:42It is amazing. Do you have an example in the barbecue space? Like I'm trying to think of how, what that might look like. And now that I think about it, at the very beginning, when I was telling you, I was trying to find an influencer, I use Google and I'm going to Reddit and that's how I found T-Roy. Now that I remember it, But in specifically selling a product, there was a, it was tips on how to smoke something called tri-tip, I believe. Okay. And I went to, went to Reddit, went to the barbecue thing. I looked up tri-tip, went in there, started looking through what people were saying. Amazing tips.

48:11Amazing tips. I take it. I go test it. It worked great. Boom. Good to go. And then putting that into an email or putting that into an article, which then drives a Facebook ad, which then drives sales. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's just one small example. I've got different businesses done different things. I've used Reddit heavy. Got it. Yeah. This is almost a page out of the Buzzfeed playbook where, you know, there's curating different tweets or different faces. And it's just, you know, now that's a piece of content for them. Exactly. And then for me, I'll go to like, cause I'm not just doing, I don't just sell barbecue recipes.

48:45I might, I had like, let's say a creamy lemon chicken or something like that. I'll go to things like all recipes or just any like popular food thing. And I do the same thing. You go and you just look at the recipe. Okay. Is that good or whatever? But then I start reading the comments. There's so much free crowdsourcing information out there. If you get creative, if you want to pay for stuff, um, there's another tool I use called SEM rush. And this talks about traffic that's at different websites. And it'll show you, Hey, this website's getting so much X traffic or whatever. But if you pay a little bit more, you figure out what the top pages are in that website.

49:23So now let's take a cooking website, like all recipes. I go there, put it in SEM rush. It will show me all the traffic. Then I'll select something called top pages and I'll sort it for top pages by the last two years. And then you'll start to see which one of their recipes got the most traffic. And if that recipe got the most traffic, well, that tells you that people are interested in it. Maybe I should write an article about that recipe because people are already interested in it. Oh, okay. Okay. And even if it's not going to rank organically, it may resonate with people on social because you've got some data to back it up.

49:56People are already finding it through all recipes. Absolutely. And so now instead of somebody having to search for it, like anything else, I'm bringing it to them. And they're like, oh, yeah, I want to know how to make great homemade brownies or something or whatever. I keep using desserts. I don't really sell the product with desserts. it's like it's got to be a thai oh cheesecake and then chicken on the side but yeah it's usually a more savory recipe than i'm advertising but when i'm trying to put on my rest on my website and my newsletters i'll just again i'm just giving out good information so i'll give them a solid brownie recipe that i got from some website plus use ai to like polish it up and give me tips i'll give them some like really good information on how to cook stuff i mean it's such an interesting angle because i imagine the cost per clicks or cost you know that you're paying to facebook are so much lower sending people to a piece of content on a recipe type of page than it would be to a product sales page.

50:48And by the conversion rate, it's obviously going to be a lot lower too. It's like there's a balance there, but there's retargeting. There's all sorts of fun stuff you can do after that you got those people to initially click. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not pushing finance or weight loss stuff or these things that have high CPCs, cost per clicks or high CPM. CPM is basically how much it costs for people to see your stuff. This is just food stuff. And I want to find a recipe that's engaging because here's one more quick tip. If you're advertising on social media, you're working with social media, you have two different people who are your readers or your clients on there.

51:21You have the people that you're trying to sell to, whoever that is. And then you have the actual platform itself. So let's take Facebook. You're trying to reach the user, but also you need to be like taking care of Facebook. Well, how do you take care of Facebook? What's Facebook in here for Facebook want Facebook or TikTok or whatever it is? Pick your social media platform. What do they want? They want people on their platform for as long as possible. So if you're putting something out there that has people on the platform, whether it's like watching a video for a while or engaging with the video or writing or sharing it or reading something, If you play Facebook's game or any social media platform's game, which is keep them on that platform for as long as you can, then that social media platform will reward you by putting your stuff out there for even cheaper.

52:05So that's the game. Okay. So it's not even driving traffic back to baldbuck.com. It's like, I'm going to copy paste the whole recipe into the body of this Facebook post. I could do that. Yeah, exactly. I could put a video out there or something. Yeah. Like if you could just keep them on there and play that game. And then also what Facebook likes is you get the biggest, I guess, bump, if you want to call it, for sharing and comments. So if you're getting people to share your stuff or comment on your stuff, if Facebook sees it, man, this post, everybody's talking about it. They're sharing it. What's Facebook going to do?

52:38Boom, boom, boom, boom. They want to keep people happy, keep people engaged, keep them on the platform. If you could do that, then you could do well. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, yeah, your cost per engagement or cost per reach goes way down because they're pushing it out. Way down. Absolutely. All right. What would you do differently? I mean, it sounds like we're three, four years into this business. If you had to start over, anything you'd do to accelerate the journey? I would have gotten more aggressive with reaching out to YouTubers or user generated content influencer, whoever it was. I still could do that to this day, but this is a side hustle.

53:10I got other stuff going on. but it's not what you have to say. It's what other people have to say about the product. And, you know, there's, there's a few ways of doing that. You can't just copy and paste a review. If you could really get other people to speak about the product for you, that gives you, it gives leverage, man. Would you approach it similarly today? It was like, Hey, we, we could do a giveaway for your audience. Would you say, Hey, I'd love for you to be an affiliate partner for this thing. You know, here's a unique referral code. Like how would you, how would you pitch it? Everything you just said, the essence of what you just said is what's in it for that person.

53:44Not caring about like, you know, obviously I have goals here, but for me to get those goals, it's a whole Zig Zig Ziglar thing, right? You can get everything you want if you help enough people get what they want. So it's what's in it for this other person. How can I make them look good or help them make money or whatever it is? Let me key in on that and then I'll get what I need from this. Fair enough. Any big surprises? The surprise was, oh no, all of a sudden it's an actual business. I'll now have to actually work with people and now I have to manage people. And that was a surprise. And so I didn't think about that prior to getting into this.

54:18I didn't see that coming. Yeah, that's interesting. The question most people ask is, what if this fails? What if it doesn't work? What if I just have to liquidate these 5 ,000 units of seasoning? The other side of it is, well, what if it does work? What's that going to look like two, three, four years down the road. And if it actually is selling, is that going to be, is that, it could be a win for me. And I mean, it sounds like yes, but just like, you know, there's, there's other things that happened along the way or that necessitated along the way. It's like, yo, if I don't want to be doing all the work, I'm going to have to bring on some help.

54:51This is something that's going to sound a little bit of woo woo, but I'm going to go there anyways. Like I told you the very beginning, I bought a bunch of units and it was, I might, I might recommend it. I'm not saying go spend a bunch of money and like put yourself into a corner. I don't, that wasn't a wise move. It was just something that I did. But I will say that I feel like the mindset behind stuff is, is underestimated. So if I bought these units feeling like, man, I don't, I don't, I don't know if I'm able to do this. Then I probably won't. If I buy these units and I'm like, I have to do this.

55:22Then it just puts me in a different mode. You're working from a totally different place. That's one. And then the second thing, what I've noticed with anything that I've started, any business or whatever, I would get caught up in what's the logo going to be? What's the product? Let me optimize the product. What's my website going to look like? What? Oh, let me change this color. And I would do all these things, do all these different things, everything, but the most important thing, which is sell it. It was a pattern of mine. It was easy to procrastinate on. Yeah. That's the hard part. But you feel like you're doing something.

55:52It's like a, like a, like a running back going from sideline to sideline instead of up the field. Like you look busy, but you're not doing anything. yeah and that's how i was like all these little things that made me feel good let me get it up maybe i should go back to school like all these things making me feel good about it but what i'm doing is really just procrastinating doing the thing that's most important which is selling the product and if i could go back and tell myself that with anything i've done is figure out how to sell it then figure everything else out yeah we'll figure out the logistics once we got some orders yeah well we could always change the logo down the road if we don't like it yeah there's all sorts of, yeah.

56:27But no, it's easy to get caught up on that, you know, because you want to put your best foot forward, but at the same time, yeah, I'm with you on all of that. But baldbuck.com, that's where you can find this. Order up some barbecue seasoning for yourself. Yo, Chris Gray is where you can find Chris on social. What's next for you? What's got you excited this year? I love our newsletter and what we're doing there. That's really fun. And then I'm really excited about where AI is right now. Kind of think that we are in the wild west of it, where in my little inner bubble circle, whatever you want to call it, everybody's talking about it, but the general population isn't really on it.

57:02And I think that this is like, you know, back in the day, I don't know how old you are, Nick. I'm 44, man. And I was around when the internet started coming to be a thing. I'm close to that. I'm almost there. Yeah, man. Well, you remember people were like, email or you could buy things online. That's how it was back then. Now look at it today. I believe we're there with AI. And we're on the precipice of it. And a lot of people don't know about it. And there's a lot of different ways to make a lot of money, maybe using AI and using AI and robotics and automation and just using AI to get ideas and help with stuff.

57:36But I think we're kind of, we're here where there's an opportunity to use it to make money or use it to help you make money or directly use it to make money. I'm excited about that. Yeah, it's a brave new world. We'll see where it goes. I'm trying to get better about using it on a daily, weekly basis. I know I'm just scratching the surface and try and crowdsource some wisdom from guests and from Side Hustle Show listeners as well. Like, what's your use case here? What am I missing out on? But very cool. So we'll link up all this stuff, baldbuck.com and Chris Gray's socials. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.

58:11My number one tip is if you are starting to sell something or you have an idea of a product that you want to do or a service you want to do, and you're just starting, find something that already works. don't get crafty and try to create something unique and have this oh this idea my blah blah blah like to get the thing off the ground to you really want to get a ball rolling find something that is already working then put your spin on it in the case of ball bug the seasoning was already selling i just need to it was already good it already tasted good i didn't need to come up with my own blend or something it was already working yeah just put i put my label on it and figured out how to sell it but i think that concept is something else that's helped me tremendously as I leverage what's already working.

58:54Yeah. Remove part of the equation, right? Like it's a way to kind of leapfrog or piggyback on what's already been done. You don't have to start completely from scratch. It's, you know, just, there's still a lot of moving parts that you got to figure out, but it's like, well, here's one, one less thing to worry about. One less thing to do. So appreciate you sharing that. That was one of my takeaways here. You may not have to be a creator, an inventor completely from scratch. Maybe you iterate on something that's already out there, but go where there's some proven demand versus trying to create demand from scratch.

59:26I loved Chris's talk about the brand positioning and then going after the partnerships. We're like, well, how am I going to sell this stuff? Who's already got some traffic and eyeballs? Well, all these barbecue influencers do. How can I make it a win for them instead of trying to find some sort of common ground and then initial outreach, lots of good tips there. And then going back to the storytelling and the emotion and his eBay example, like it's the same stuff. It's the same commodity that it was 10 minutes ago, but now it has this story attached to it, people willing to pay a premium for that, plus some creative ways to increase the average order size.

59:59You're going to do the shipping and logistics side of it anyways. What's another couple of jars of stuff to throw into the box? How do you incentivize people to increase that average order value? What do you think? Is there an opportunity to white label a product that you already love? Your free listener bonus for this episode is my list of 20 hobby-related niches to get your creative juices flowing, like barbecue might be a hobby for you as well. Other stuff you might be able to sell for a profit. Just follow the show notes link in the episode description. It'll get you right over there. You'll be able to download that for free.

1:00:30Again, my list of 20 other hobby-related niches. Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Maybe it's to that barbecue lover in your life. Maybe it's to somebody who's just on the cusp of that next side hustle idea. Would love your help in spreading the word.

1:01:02Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.