Kunle: Hi guys, welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast show and today I’m joined by two cofounders of MuscleForLife.com and Legion Athletics. Basically Muscle For Life is a scientific approach to building muscle and losing fat. It’s a range of books which these two chaps have put together and sells thousands, basically, on Amazon every year. And to the side of that business as a complimentary part of the business they also have Legion Athletics, which is a supplements business, again which is super successful on Amazon. So if you’re interested in Amazon, these guys are experts to help, sort of unpick their brains today. We’re going to find out a lot more about how they do sell on Amazon. Prior to coming on the show, Mike specifically told me that he’s not here to talk about secrets or tricks to selling at Amazon and he’s here to sure how to properly and effectively run an e-commerce business that happens to use Amazon as a channel. And the basic fundamentals really are good products, branding, copy, customer service, advertising, and the lot. So without further ado, I’d like to welcome Mike Matthews, joined by his co-founder Jeremy Blumberg to the show. Welcome guys.

Mike: Yeah, thanks alot. Thanks for having us.

Jeremy: Thanks for having us.

Kunle: Brilliant, brilliant. So I’ve just had a real quick intro and probably not done you justice. Could you each take about 30 to 60 seconds to introduce yourselves to listeners, please?

Mike: Sure. I’ll go first. So I’m Mike and I am a writer. I mean, you covered it basically, so I have some books and then Muscle For Life is kind of a glorified blog. We’re going to be expanding it, it’s very under-monetized, it just is because we put so much of our time and effort into building up Legion and then Muscle For Life has been mainly sustained on me just kind of writing content every week, which is something I’ll continue doing but you know it gets about 1.4 million visits a month right now and it continues to grow so it’s time that we do more with it, so that’s going to be one of Jeremy’s big projects coming up soon. So yeah, I’m a writer and that’s kind of my main role in our partnership and in our businesses really, so.

Jeremy: Yeah. So I’m Jeremy, I’ve known Mike for around 15 years. So he initially, like he said he’s a writer, he wrote the books which kind of became the foundation for everything that we ended up doing. And I’m interested in marketing so I came on as a marketer to work with him to promomote the books and then as you mentioned there was a natural progression going into Legion. And from there, that’s the branding of Legion that as far as the look of the products, all that stuff is kind of falls on me. All the copywriting, all that stuff falls on Mike. And yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Mike: Yeah, and of course there’s a lot of back and forth and a lot of overlap between our roles. And it’s not just me and Jeremy, we have a team so we’ve been able to become more and more specialized in what work we’re doing on a day-to-day basis. But along the way, we’ve done a lot of everything, basically.

Kunle: Okay. Okay. And how long has Muscle For Life been running as a blog? 1.2 million is, it’s not child’s play you know, on a monthly basis. Not many people can achieve that. So how long have you been running and what were your traffic figures like over time?

Mike: March 2013 is when MFL launched. And initially it had a little bit of traffic because we were rolling it over from the previous website, BuildHealthyMuscle.com that I did nothing with, it just kind of sat there and it was just junk really.

Jeremy: It would get traffic from links inside the books, basically.

Mike: Yeah, really from people just reading the books and googling, and then Google like didn’t know what to serve, so it’s like, well I guess Mike has something to do with this, and so it got a little bit of traffic.

Jeremy: I think we had 20-something thousand on our first month so it’s not bad.

Mike: Yeah, exactly, not bad for that. But then it grew very quickly because, well, I mean just doing, well we decided to really kind of do it right, from the beginning, in terms of SEO and really give Google what it wants, which is longform, well-written content that has good internal linking that people like and share around as opposed to trying to get fancy with you know paying random people to write junk content so I can post articles every day and link-wheeling and all that crap. We just didn’t bother with any of that.

Kunle: So it was down to quality generated by yourselves and your team, your internal team.

Mike: Exactly, I mean the writing has always been me. Sometimes Jeremy will read over things, just from an editing, kind of like hey, this kind of sounds wierd or wherever. But from the beginning, the writing has always been me. And that’s something also that I personally enjoy, it’s probably, out of all the work that I do, I enjoy the writing the most so it’s at least, I can be selfish in that way it works out for us.

Jeremy: Yeah, more or less just a straightforward content marketing strategy.

Mike: Yeah, and for that, I’m sure people that are listening to this, if they’re familiar with e-commerce at all they’ve probably heard of Neil Patel.

Kunle: Yes.

Mike: But it they haven’t I recommend checking out. Neil’s stuff is a good resource on this.

Jeremy: QuickSprout.com and NeilPatel.com

Mike: Yeah, he has, and that’s really, like we just kind of follow the simple, ’It’s a lot of work and you have to be good at what you’re doing, but if you do it right it really can pay off.’

Kunle: It pays off, yes, yes. So Mike, I’ve seen your photograph across the Internet. You’re quite a ripped guy, you seem to be the face of the company. So is it deliberate? And what came before the website? Because you mentioned you had a previous website that got links from your books. So had you been publishing your books prior to Muscle For Life? Were they already there, were you on offer? Yes, two questions.

Mike: Yeah sure, so I published Bigger, Leaner, Stronger, self published it in 2012, it’s early in the year 2012, I want to say January. And that was initially because, this is when Amazon’s Kindle platform, their KDP Kindle Direct Platform or whatever, I think Kindle Direct Publishing, anyway that’s when it was gaining quite a bit of news coverage, media coverage, because this dude named John Locke who was like the first guy to sell a million books on Kindle. And growing up I kind of like wondered what I want to do with my life. My dad is an entrepreneur and he had built some successful companies, but the idea just going to business and selling widgets you know or whatever didn’t really interest me. And taking over any of his stuff didn’t really interest me. So it was kind of on a lark where it was just like, well, I like to read so maybe I like to write. And so I kind of got into writing and my interest initially was fiction and I still have, that’s still something I’m going to be doing. And, oh, I found fitness writing because along the way, I mean I grew up playing sports and then got into weightlifting kind of didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning and you know, something I do with my friends or whatever. And for the first X number of years, about seven years, I had done a bunch of magazine workouts and wasn’t really educated but I knew I wasn’t educated. So at that point I decided to get educated and start learning about proper dieting and proper weightlifting and learning about the science and the physiology and how things actually work. Got really good results in my body, started sharing what I was learning with other people, got good results in them. And along the way somebody had said, hey, you should write a book basically and at first I was like yeah, I’m interested in writing. Like, you want to write, why don’t you write fitness stuff? I’m like, I don’t know if I really care to try to be a fitness guru kind of guy. But somewhere along the way I was like, okay, fine, I’ll give it a go. So that was Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and published with no expectations actually in the beginning. I just put up and I did as good of a job as I could. It wasn’t just a hack job, although I’ve gotten much better at writing since then. If I looked at it now, I’d be like, ‘God that’s bad, how did anybody like that. Uh uh.’ [laughs]

Kunle: [laughs] First situation.

Mike: [laughs] So, but well I guess one thing I did get right in the beginning, I think, is the branding of it. The title’s very good because it just encapsulates, like any guy that gets into working out, that’s what they want. They want to get bigger, leaner, and stronger. So in that first year, I think the first month maybe sold 20 copies or something. Maybe even, and I was just surprised that anyone bought it. I was like, that’s cool, it works. And then within a few months it was selling it maybe a couple hundred copies a month or something and I started getting emails from people saying that they like it. And I start working on the next book because I saw there’s an opportunity here and you know, I can get into fitness writing. I like fitness, I do have a passion for it. And I like to research and read so that I can work. And so that was kind of the first year. And then along the way Jeremy and I, like Jeremy said, we’ve known each other for a long time and he also, he’s a bit younger than I am. I’m 31, he’s 25…

Jeremy: 26…

Mike: Woah. He’s old now, he’s old. [laughs] So along the way you know, I was talking with Jeremy, and what does he want to do? He’s in a similar situation where his family has a business. He didn’t really want to work in his family’s business, they wanted him to but he was kind of ‘eh’ about it.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Mike: And so the original idea was that him and I would do a publishing company and kind of apply what I had learned in this first whatever, 6 – 7 – 8 months probably when we first started talking about it, of selling books. And we would apply that, you know not that I would become Mike Matthews the fitness guy, but we would actually take that…

Jeremy: Mike Mathews the publishing guy.

Mike: Mike Mathews the publisher. And Jeremy in talking, we thought that marketing would just fit his talents and fit his personality well and then that could be something he could really dive into. And then I would play more the editor/publisher kind of guy. And but then, so we actually started, went down that path and came up with the company name, started to put together a website and we were going to do it. And then but in that time, the fitness stuff was just kind growing exponentially.

Jeremy: Yeah, things we were planning on testing out on future books we released, we would first test them out on the fitness stuff and it was all responding so well to it, it kind of eventually exploded.

Mike: So then we just made a decision, changed course, like as much as I was initially kind of not really into the idea of becoming a fitness person per se, like persona or whatever, we said okay well this is too good of an opportunity, we need to just do this. Yep, so.

Kunle: Okay

Jeremy: And then on your other question for the branding for him being the face, yeah that was all intentional from the beginning. Because it’s kind of a problem in this industry, that we think, there’s not really a face to any of the companies, any of the other self-fitness companies out here.

Mike: Or in some cases like, ON has Steve Cook and that’s fine but…

Jeremy: Yeah, he has nothing to do with the company, he’s just a paid…

Mike: Exactly, everybody knows that. He just, he’s a good-looking dude, he’s got a great physique, but that’s it.

Jeremy: Yeah, he’s got the physique but he doesn’t have anything to actually do with the operation of the companies. So it’s something, we always wanted to be very transparent with who runs the company. People can talk directly to Mike, his email address is right in the books if you want to reach out to him. It just kind of was part of our mantra from the beginning.

Mike: Yeah.

Kunle: Okay, okay. So, it seemed it was quite personal, quite your personality. Your personality was quite reflected in the book. I have question now, because I have a few muscle books although I’m not anyway muscular, I just read halfway… I’m just flipping through Bigger Leaner Stronger now on Amazon, and it’s visual. Is it intentional? Because I don’t think muscle/fitness books should be all text. So did you just take photographs of… how did you get these case studies? I know this is second edition. How did you come up with the content for the book initially? Was it more text or was it visual or a combination of both?

Mike: The book is mainly text. What you’re looking at is kind of the front matter which has success stories. And we have hundreds and hundreds of success stories on the website now because, I mean with how many books have already been sold and how many books continue to be sold, we’ve really built up a pipeline of people that… I mean we have a backlog of success, like somebody could probably spend a hundred hours just posting success stories for the websites. We just release them out one or two a week and you know, just let it build up. But those are just actually organic people reaching out. People emailing me in a lot of cases, which is cool, people emailing initially… maybe they have some questions, ‘Hey, I read the book. I liked it.’ And then over the course the next six months I’ve stayed in touch with them, they’ve reach out again. They had a couple questions here and there and and now I get to see their success stories. So those people in the books are actual people that, you know you’re looking at somebody that they started however they started, they read the book, they used what they learned, and they ended up the way they ended up. And of course, time frames vary and stuff. But otherwise the book is not very visual. It’s mainly text or some diagrams to explain certain key exercises and certain things. But I actually didn’t like that about other fitness books that are out on the market, especially at that time, was that there’s too much visual fluff. There’s like, a quarter of the book is just images on how to do exercises, you don’t read a book for that, just go on YouTube and watch Scott Herman’s videos, that’s that’s all you need. Or watch, I’ll be shooting videos later this year on how to do…

Jeremy: Watch my video.

Mike: Watch my videos, but…

Jeremy: Or BodyBuilder.com

Mike: BodyBuilder.com had good videos. But you know, it was just a way to pad a book, because if a publisher’s picking a book up they say okay, we need 275 pages and you’re like, well, I have 100 pages of actual content. And they’re like, alright, well let’s just filled up with images of people doing exercises with sample meal plans and sample workout plans, there’s at least 100 pages and can you just spin 50 pages you know, 10,000 words of stuff. So in this case, I actually, I’m trying to really…the idea with the books, Bigger Leaner Stronger and Thinner Leaner Stronger particularly, is to have an all-in-one, that if someone wants to achieve the goal that most people want when they get into fitness, most guys they don’t want to be a massive bodybuilder type of person, they want to look lean, athletic, muscular, strong, feel good, look good. I have a book where if you read this book, you can go out and learn more if you want to educate yourself further and if you want to get more serious about it. But if you just want to look, if you want get the kind of results that you see in the beginning, you don’t need anything else actually. You can just read this and do this and the majority of the people of our, at least our most fervent followers I could say, are people that…fitness is not their life. They have jobs, they have families, they have 4 – 6 hours a week to give to it and so it was kind of written for those people.

Kunle: As you alluded to earlier, it’s a scientific approach, so you understand the basics, the science behind your actions that will preempt you to actually being lean and stronger, I supposed.

Mike: Right.

Kunle: Okay. Right. So let’s… are you are still self-published or are you with a publisher at the moment?

Jeremy: No, still self-published.

Mike: Yeah.

Jeremy: Talked with different publishers.

Mike: Turned a deal down from Simon & Schuster.

Kunle: That is a good position to be in. So how many books do you sell per year?

Mike: It’s good question. Per year it’s about 25,000 units a month so I’m getting the final numbers for last year, it’s going to be somewhere around 300,000 to 400,000 units last year. And that’s digital and paperback and audiobook, that’s everything all in.

Kunle: From the average price here it’s about $12 – $14 a piece. That’s a healthy chunk as a self published…

Mike: It ranges. I mean of course though the 80/20 it applies in that the majority of those sales are the more expensive books, it’s Bigger Leaner Stronger, Thinner Leaner Stronger, and The Shredded Chef which is a cookbook. But you know I had digital books for $2.99 for example and I even have a $.99 book and…

Jeremy: Yeah, more as like an introductory.

Mike: Yeah, just, hey, this is a low commitment, low friction, if you like what you read here then you will like this stuff that is again in the grand scheme of things especially in fitness, you know $9.99…Bigger Leaner Stronger, if you go to Amazon it’s $9.99 for the digital. Considering how much information your getting and the fact that you can email me and get an answer and really actually get that level of service is very unusual. Because in the fitness space what you normally would see is like a ClickBank type of deal that is $150 or $100 or whatever and you’re just getting some PDFs and you’re not even getting as a good quality of content and you are most definitely not getting real service. I mean, I know people in this space that they just have paid virtual assistants to answer questions but the people that are answering don’t know fitness, they don’t know, so they’re answers in a lot of cases don’t even really make…they’re not even helpful.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kunle: Okay, so this is a no gimmicks no BS approach to health and fitness.

Mike: Right.

Kunle: You have a bestseller in the antioxidants category in books, that’s The Shredded Chef, and another best seller I could see, hip and thigh workouts, Thinner Leaner Stronger, so yeah I can imagine being a bestseller on Amazon and the kind of exposure that gives you.

Mike: Yeah. I mean Bigger Leaner Stronger is usually number one in something at all times as well.

Jeremy: Weight training or…

Mike: Yeah, weight training or one of the other, I think, I don’t remember which one but yeah.

Jeremy: Yeah, there’re like a few in the weight training.

Mike: Yeah, sometimes it will run the table, like every single one will be number one.

Jeremy: The top ten in weight training will be like four of our books. The Kindle version will be [00:23:05.24 inaudible] the paper back version, the audiobook.

Mike: Beyond Bigger Leaner, like everything.

Kunle: Wow, you guys have done an amazing job. What about the supplements business? Legion Athletics? How does that sort of work? Is is like a separate entity to the information part, to the books? Or are they kind of joined up together?

Jeremy: They do have a natural flow from one to the other because you read the books you get in health and fitness, part of that role is supplements. They are separate entities though entirely and that was also intentional.

Mikw: Yeah, we didn’t want to put it under the Muscle For Life umbrella because one, I don’t like that as a name, I don’t think it’s a good brand. And two, I don’t want to get sued by the Fit For Life or Body For Life guys. I know that they got into a lawsuit battle. I can use that as my blog name all day long, I’ve checked that with lawyers before I even did it because it’s a blog and whatever. But you know if were selling branded supplements, Muscle For Life, there’s a possibility that one of those guys would sue. So we were just like those are two very good reasons to not do that.

Jeremy: Yeah, also from a marketing standpoint, it’s nice to have a specialty with the business. It’s nice to be known for one thing. Muscle For Life is known for fitness information. Legion is known for supplements and we’ve intentionally done that. But we want to do apparel soon and that’ll be its… We’ll test run it with Legion and Muscle For Life but if it goes well, it’ll eventually become its own company.

Mike: Yeah, we want to avoid the line extension mistake from a marketing/branding standpoint.

Kunle: Yeah, quite interesting. And what I picked up from this you know as you said, a lot information marketers or sellers will sell low ticket items with a view to selling $150 items, all within the information space but you give quite a decent fair price with your books and you have the supplements business as another entity, which is kind of like a cross-sell but not necessarily.

Mike: Mmm hmm, yeah.

Kunle: And it’s ethical at the same time, so it works from my perspective anyway.

Mike: Yeah the idea is to create like an ecosystem. Like we’re building an app as well, which if anybody wants to check it out you can go to GetStackedApp.com and it should be out, summer’s going to be the latest. It got derailed with bad developers previously but now it’s in good hands and it’s rolling along so the idea there is it’s going to be really a great thing unto itself. It’s not just like a tack-on, we’re spending a lot of money on it actually and a lot of time. But we’re going to be putting a store in that as well so we like to look at what else can we bring to our orbit, so to speak, that can contribute to everything as opposed to you know something that may just feed itself. We’re more excited about things that can feed everything.

Kunle: All right, this is quite clever. So you have stuff in the information space, you have stuff in the product space, and now you’re going into the apps and SaaS space.

Jeremy: Anywhere where we can see an opportunity. We’ve known it from experience from using a bunch of app that they’re bad.

Kunle: All right, right, is this going to be a subscription-based business, GetStackedApp.com?

Mike: No, it’s going to be an iOS app so… we haven’t decided yet on how we want it, like are we going Freemium or are we just going to go Premium or are we going to go Free Trial, we haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be so good that people will gladly pay, let’s say $5 for it. I can guarantee you if anyone listening is a weightlifter you’re going to really like this app. And majority of the apps are bad and if you just use Google Sheets or a simple work notepad which is what I do and you know until I have this, I understand and that the point of this app is to make something better than Google Sheets.

Kunle: Okay. Because I use FitStar, I think it’s like a £25 annual subscription, which equates about $40 a year and their workout menu is pretty static. Yeah and there is a Freemium element to it. It’s an annual subscription which you don’t fill, really, the end of the day.

Jeremy: And it’s only a webapp or it’s an iOS app as well?

Kunle: It’s an iOS app and so I largely use it on my iPad and then I Airplay it to my Apple TV in morning.

Mike: Interesting.

Jeremy: I would think a subscription would make sense if I were giving regular content for it. Like I would think it would be lame to pay monthly for an app that doesn’t really get updated or changed at all, it just is what it is. I don’t know, to the Saas people that’s normal but it just seems to be… but who knows, I don’t know enough about app marketing but it’s something we haven’t dived in yet, we’re not there yet, you know.

Kunle: It’s like a jigsaw puzzle and what they do is you put in your goals and when you put in your goals it would sort of go into their archive of workouts and then join them up. And then if someone else came in… so they just have like a fixed pool of work outs and then you just go in there and then it selects the workouts that would best suit what you’re looking for, if that makes sense, it’s all just prebuilt, really.

Mike: Yeah, ours going to be different and it’s much more targeted to experienced weightlifters, actually.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kunle: Fantastic. I really like how everything is expanding and complimentary. Okay so, talking about your Legion Athletics, how many SKUs does your business have? My count on Amazon was about eight, is that about right or?

Jeremy: Yeah, that’s close. If you factor in the variance on flavors for different products…

Mike: And now with size.

Jeremy: Yeah, now we’re going to have size, we’re adding 5 pound tubs of whey protein where we probably just have the 2 pounds tubs. So if you factor all that in maybe it’s 15 SKUs but yeah, we have eight individual products.

Mike: We have a ninth coming.

Kunle: Okay, eight individual and then multiple variants. Okay.

Jeremy: Exactly, yeah. For example, the Pre-Workout has four flavors so that’ll put you up to 11 SKUs right there.

Kunle: Okay. And do you mention it in the copy on Muscle For Life, or?

Jeremy: Yeah, absolutely. Muscle For Life feeds the Legion…

Mike: Yeah, I mean I only promote stuff either that I use myself and like, and this goes beyond supplements, like I like this body fat caliber and here’s why. And supplements-wise, we only promote our stuff or in some cases there are supplements that we don’t make that I still like and use, like I supplement with additional vitamin D because it’s a good idea and my body particular needs more vitamin D than what’s in our multivitamin. Our multivitamin has a good baseline for everyone but my body specifically needs more so I take a vitamin D from NOW Foods. We’re going to end up making our own so I’ll replace that when the time comes but on Muscle For Life we’ve turned down a lot of money and a lot of offers to you know obviously promote all kinds of stuff. But we use all of our ad space on the website and all of our email, everything is just promoting our own stuff because that just makes the most sense.

Kunle: It makes sense, exactly. They are the best margins. So from a sales standpoint, what’s Legion Athletics doing at the moment on Amazon or?

Jeremy: On Amazon? On Amazon last year which would have been our second year, we did around $2 million in sales. This year we’re shooting to probably about double that.

Mike: Yeah, I’d say.

Kunle: That’s fantastic. Okay. And out of Amazon, do you wholesale? Do you have any distribution?

Jeremy: Yeah, the nature of Legion, the products are very much, the margin on the products are very much meant for direct to consumer. We spend I’d say 3 to 5 times more than the average other supplement to create ours, just because they’re pretty stacked when it comes to what’s in them and the dosages they’re provided at so the wholesale model just doesn’t really work for us.

Mike: Yeah and that was intentional was well in the beginning, because here’s the problem in the supplement space, especially retail, is you go to GNC and buy a pre-workout for $40, it was produced for no more than five dollars but probably less, probably more like it was produced for three or four dollars, that bottle, and then it goes through several middlemen, finally gets you. So that’s standard, like whatever shirt you’re wearing you didn’t know that like it was made for a 10th or less of what you paid but you don’t care. You buy the shirt because you like the shirt and it’s not being sold like it’s going to change your life, it’s a shirt, buy it or don’t buy it, it’s on a rack, you like it, here you go. Supplements are very different in that one you can’t make a good supplement pre-workout for three dollars, four dollars, even five dollars. You cannot make a good product, it does not work. And supplements are then marketed like they’re going to change your life and you’re going to build all this muscle and you’re going to become the super alpha male of the universe and it’s all bullshit. So we went into it initially knowing that if we’re going to make good products, we’re going to have to spend a lot more to produce them because there are good…it’s not that supplements are inherently bad, it’s just that most of the supplements on the market are bad. But if supplements were made with good ingredients at proper clinically effective dosages, the dosages that are seen in scientific research like, you know you take things that are proven to improve your workout performance if you take enough of it. But if you take the enough, it’s quite expensive because you know you take something like beta-alanine and you need five grams, that’s quite expensive. So that was very intentional in the beginning, we know that retail would never work for us unless we were selling directly to the retailer. Then we would have lower margins then but we’d be willing to do that. But wholesalers will never work. But you know that was also, when we were looking at in the beginning, e-commerce is just on the rise and retail is on the decline and we’re just going to see more and more of that. So we really want to position ourselves with, we’re going to be primarly an e-commerce company, we’re going to sell direct to consumers, we’re going to be on Amazon, we may get on BodyBuilding – they reached out several times, it’s something we’ll look at. So that was also very intentional, it wasn’t like we did it and then realized, ‘Oh wait, retail’s not going to work.’

Kunle: Is BodyBuilding another website?

Jeremy: Yeah, BodyBuilding.com.

Kunle: Okay, BodyBuilding.com, okay. Okay, this is a recurring scene I’m seeing. I’ve interviewed, my last 3 – 4 – 5 guests on the e-tailers are direct to consumer and they’re set to disrupting industries by adding more value and cutting out the middlemen.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s great. Honestly, I love it personally as a consumer, I think it’s great. I’d way rather pay the same and get a product that’s twice or three times as good.

Mike: Exactly.

Kunle: Three times, exactly. Which just makes a lot of sense. I’m on the Legion website, which is just nice you know, in terms of the user experience. I’m on the 30-day Bigger Leaner…

Mike: That was at Jeremy’s…

Jeremy: That’s my child.

Mike: Yeah, 6 months of work right there.

Kunle: Quality work here.

Jeremy: Thanks.

Kunle: And it seems personalised also. So when you get in, it asks if you’re a man or a woman and then you click and then you get a different experience, which is very, very good. Okay, so you have a really interesting business and are there any seasonality trends you’ve noticed, like Christmas or actually, the New Year? [laughs]

Jeremy: Acutally I was going to say, New Years is fantastic for us, I mean for sure our Q4 was our biggest quarter ever. Black Friday is great. Christmas was good, December in general is okay but you know I think a lot of people are getting ready for just dealing with the holiday binging they just did, so people…

Mike: Yeah, I mean if you look, go in Google Trends and just look at in general interest in like dieting, weightlifting, health, fitness, especially fitness stuff is, December is the low.

Jeremy: Yeah, people do not want to have to look at themselves.

Mike: Yeah, because they know, they’re like all right January’s coming, I’m just going to ride this out and wear extra-baggy clothes.

Jeremy: Yeah, January’s a huge buy for us, January February March it continues to uptrend and also in the summer because then you get people who want to be beach-ready so. We get a huge spike in the New Years and then you kind of just slowly rides up until November – December where it crashes a bit and then the cycle repeats.

Kunle: Okay.

Mike: Yeah. And there’s a general uptrend in the whole space. Again, if you look in Google Trends where each cycle is just larger, all the numbers are larger than the previous ones because it’s becoming much more mainstream now to be fit. To not necessarily be a bodybuilder, but to be fit healthy, to be healthy, to do some sort of workout, whether it be CrossFit or just weightlifting or 90X or whatever it is. So I think that this is a big trend that it hasn’t, its wave hasn’t even begun to crest and so we’re excited about that. I don’t think we’re going to see a decline anytime soon if at all, I don’t know, it’s just becoming more and more of a thing.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s awesome.

Kunle: Are you going to go down the Warby Parker way or path in regards to opening a physical retail store sometime in the future, I am not saying 2016, but do you have any vision of?

Jeremy: We’ve had some short talks about that but nothing, definately nothing concrete.

Mike: Yeah, nothing, it wouldn’t be anytime soon but.

Jeremy: We thought it might be fun to have kind of all-in-one gym trainings.

Kunle: A gym, yeah, exactly, experiential, something experiential.

Jeremy: Yeah. I think it will be something where we’d probably want to do it with some type of strategic partner because neither of us have any experience with physical locations, both just all of our experiences online where we’re very comfortable. So if the right opportunity was there, I would.

Mike: It could be done, it could be done well especially given the information and educational side of what we’re doing so this isn’t just a gym where you come just do whatever. This is a gym where you can come and really learn how to get in shape and so an all-in-one kind of one-stop shop type of deal.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s kind of like how we sell our coaching. Like we sell our one-on-one coaching service, like very limited, we only take on a few clients at a time but kind of same concept – we want you to fire us at the end of the coaching because we don’t want you to have to use anymore. When you learn, you learn how to do it. So if that kind of opportunity arose, then I’d say it’s possible but.

Mike: Yeah.

Kunle: I like that, ‘we want you to fire us at the end of the coaching’. [laughs]

Mike: That’s actually our copy. That’s like if I did my job correctly you’re going to fire me in three months.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Kunle: That’s really good. Okay, okay. So just tracking back to my introduction, Mike, you wrote in your email to me initially that you’re not here to talk about hacks and cracks and you know, gimmicks in growing your business. It’s really down to the fundamentals. Could you please break down these fundamentals from your perspective, what has been the ingredients to the success of both Legion supplements and the book and brand, Muscle For Life?

Mike: Sure, I’ll start with books and then I’ll throw the football to Jeremy and he can talk a little bit about another element of it. So with the books I would say the number one most important thing to selling books is to write a book that is really good, that people talk about. Word-of-mouth is the driving force of book sales. We don’t do any advertising. I mean, I have some AMS ads just because Amazon invited me to their AMS platform and I was like, yeah sure, whatever and yeah, it sells books but if the book doesn’t have that virality factor it’s just not to make it. You’ll never sell a lot of books.

Jeremy: Yeah, I would say another thing that helps with the virality factor is that you are available.

Mike: Definitely.

Jeremy: Yeah, the fact that you can email Mike directly and get a response from Mike increases the word-of-mouth potential.

Mike: A lot. And also of course it generates a lot of reviews because it’s just very unusual…

Jeremy: Something I don’t know why more people don’t do it, I guess because it takes time, a couple hours a day to sit there but…

Mike: Yeah, but that element has been hugely important and I’ve spoken about that so much and it’s something we’re always going to keep in. And I figure Charles Darwin took you know a couple hours, he answered hand writing, answered letters a couple hours a day his entire life so if Darwin could do it I can’t complain.

Kunle: [laughs] That’s a good one.

Mike: Handwriting too. So that’s been a huge part, especially in this space where people have questions and the books are very comprehensive but you know there are circumstantial things, and, ‘Hey, I would love to do this way but I can’t because of these reasons,’ and then it maybe takes me a minute to answer that email but the amount of goodwill that that generates is so disproportionate to the time, it’s just always time well spent. So yes, having that follow-up and that service is great as well. And so, and then of course, cover matters a lot on books. Title matters a lot. And when you have all that in place then of course now Muscle For Life, and we recently about six months ago we launched a blog over at Legion which I write on as well and that’s doing well, it’s at about 150,000 visits a month right now, which it’s not going as quickly as Muscle For Life did but in the beginning Muscle For Life was getting more content every week and also it’s just harder now to build a blog in health and fitness space, like exponentially harder actually, than when we started Muscle For Life.

Jeremy: Ton of competition.

Mike: It’s so competitive now.

Jeremy: There’s always been competition in fitness, now question, but it’s gotten pretty intense.

Mike: Yeah, so…

Kunle: So how…sorry for cutting you short, but how much of your time do you write now?

Jeremy: All day.

Mike: A lot.

Jeremy: 12 – 14 hours a day. [laughs]

Mike: A lot. Like actual time running, because that’s the majority of my work. Like the kind of work that Jeremy, the kind of stuff he needs from me is generally writing stuff.

Jeremy: Yep, copy.

Mike: Copy. So I’m writing copy, I’m writing emails, I’m writing writing articles, I’m usually working another book project.

Jeremy: Proofing my writing. [laughs]

Mike: Yeah, so I don’t know, I write a lot. So my average work week is somewhere maybe about 60 to 70 hours and I would say a good 70% of that is probably writing.

Kunle: Wow.

Jeremy: It’s just always going to be some operational things, management, and now we have like 9 employees now?

Mike: 10?

Jeremy: Or 10?

Mike: 10 including you and me, I don’t know.

Jeremy: There’s like 10 of us, ish, so there’s going to be some managerial activities that take up a bit of our time but, yeah.

Kunle: It’s still hard graft, really hard graft. And so are all 10 employees in the same office space or do you work remotely?

Jeremy: No remote, the only ones that are remote are our dev, our developers, our graphic designers, but everyone else we prefer to have in-house.

Kunle: In-house, in New York? Your based in New York?

Jeremy: In Florida.

Mike: Florida. Tampa Bay area.

Kunle: Okay, okay. Fits the theme of your business.

Jeremy: Yeah, we live walking distance of the beach, so have to stay fit.

Kunle: Okay, okay.

Mike: But so to go back to your original question if you want to dive into that more, so that was books and then in terms of region, let’s say…

Jeremy: Yeah, from a strictly Amazon perspective it really is again how Mike said it, there’s no secrets really, or tricks. I mean there are but none that are not gong to get you banned eventually. [laughs] Because Amazon watches for that.

Mike: And now, Amazon has said that they want to take on BodyBuilding.com which is the biggest online retailer of supplements, fitness supplements. So in Amazon, they’re cracking down now which is great to see. There were some really bad abusers, like Ubervita and stuff, that company was ridiculous, the stuff they would do and Amazon banned them, they are gone forever. And that was a lot of money, Amazon they were probably doing $30 million a year on Amazon, $20 – $30 million dollars a year and Amazon permanently banned them, said go away, never come…

Kunle: What did they do?

Jeremy: I mean there was a multitude of things but…

Mike: They had shady, yeah… Shady reviews.

Jeremy: Yeah they had a lot of fake reviews, they were buying review constantly. They were…

Mike: Threatening people that would leave one-star reviews.

Jeremy: Pushing people around a lot, basically. They would go to their competitors, and it’s something that happens on Amazon, people still do it, we’ve had it done to us multiple times, but over the period of like month or so you’ll leave negative one-star reviews on your competitors’ pages and then overnight you’ll pay someone to upload them all, so your entire front page is just filled with one-star bad reviews, basically. I’ve had to reach out multiple times, I don’t even remember the name of the team, there’s a team high up at Amazon that works personally for Mr. Bezos that’s had to go in and fix those for you, delete all the bad reviews, investigate. And everything that they were investigating I get eventually led back to Ubervita there were really a ton of people complaining so they got…

Mike: I don’t know if Ubervita was doing that to us.

Jeremy: I don’t think they did it to us but I know, there are a couple people we know in this space…

Mike: Some other people we know for a fact do this stuff. Ubervita might have been above that by now because their scam was on another level.

Jeremy: Yeah, they were also, they would include things in their packages that had you reach out to them for other products and they would mine…

Mike: Incentivise reviews.

Jeremy: Yeah, they would mine data that way and I know another case that…

Mike: There’s a lot of stuff that… Basically, what Jeremy’s point is, if you’re listening to this and you want to get into Amazon, if anything seems like it’s kind of shady and you kind of know that Amazon probably wouldn’t like that, don’t do it. Because if they find you, and they’re getting more and more serious about this whole FBA game, they will just ban you.

Jeremy: Yeah for example, just in the growth of the category in general, our pre-workout was sitting around 1600 to 2200 sales ranking in the health and personal care category. And a year ago when we used to sit in that same ranking I would do 200 to 300 bottles a week. And now we sit at that same ranking doing 500 to 600 bottles a week. So the sales in the category have practically doubled.

Kunle: That’s because Amazon just keeps bringing people on.

Mike: Yeah, and they’re pumping the advertising money.

Kunle: Advertising, yeah, Amazon Prime.

Mike: They said they want to take on BodyBuilders, so.

Jeremy: Yeah, so it’s a lot of the basics. Have good products, obviously. We have our own angle to our products with the science-based approach. All our products are all natural, we don’t use any artificial sweeteners/flavous. So obviously anything you’re going to do, any part of your release, make sure it’s a good product, make sure you have a good angle.

Mike: A good USP. Why should anybody choose this over another and we didn’t want to only ride on my personality for that. We didn’t want to say, well you should buy this product because it’s Mike’s and that the only reason why. We wanted, we really wanted Legion to be able to stand on it’s own where I would like Legion to be known as an amazing supplement company. Not as, oh those are Mike’s supplements.

Kunle: Okay, I’m on your page now, so it’s got a great headline, which is subject or title. Great photos, really, really goo photos. I like the logo, which is scientific, it looks like a proton, and then you have good description.

Jeremy: That’s the thing I see people getting wrong a lot, honestly. A lot of the basics on Amazon, it is, it’s have good photos, have good description, have a good title, use keywords obviously.

Mike: Have good copy.

Jeremy: Have good copy.

Mike: It actually sells.

Jeremy: Find a copy writer.

Kunle: And then you also have a final extension, I guess you’ve registered your brand, which has HTML…

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s called A+ Plus Content, it’s with the Amazon Vendor services, so basically we work through a distributor for that, to get that, but we’re actually setting it up so we can do it ourselves now. And that’s just basically we send products directly to Amazon and when you see, it’ll say like, sold by Legion Athletics fulfilled by Amazon, instead of just saying sold by Amazon. When you are part of Vendor program you gain access to certain things like their advertising platform and that is one of the things you can access with that.

Kunle: It’s just pumped up the product page, I can see the ‘no GMO no artificial…’ and these are really good KPIs to have. And then it also has a range of your other brands, Pulse, Pheonix, Forge, Triumph, and Recharge. It’s really well done, it’s really well done. I can see why it’s so successful, apart from the experience where you’re getting all five-star reviews here.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just really quickly what I wanted to say is a lot of people don’t fully utilize the space of the bullets in the description space. We have a lot of the characters there, like we use all 2,000 characters.

Mike: We do max, like I sit and I try to go down literally to the last character, like I’m always playing with things and…

Jeremy: Yeah, Amazon wants you to use that space, that space helps you rank for things, it’s about…

Mike: That means like if I have to exclude a period, many of them are down to the last character where a sentence is not ending with a period because I can’t fit it anymore.

Jeremy: It’s making your page visible and then having good copy so it sells.

Mike: And having good reviews which we’re very, like whenever customers write in and say how much they like our stuff we always ask them, hey would you mind just take a minute write a quick review on Amazon. And if people, when we get negative reviews, I personally respond to all negative reviews, I want to see them all. I also am responding to, I try to respond to every review. It’s either going to be me or one of our customer service guys are going to respond but I definitely see all negative reviews myself, because I want to know. I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback that way, that’s also probably just a good general tip actually whether it be books or whatever, don’t shy away from negative reviews. Like I know authors that don’t ever even read reviews on Amazon. That’s stupid, that’s so stupid. If you are that sensitive than that sucks for you. I do know, that’s bad. Even from a business standpoint, because I’ve gotten so many good suggestions from people and feedback, like legitimate.

Jeremy: That left us a negative review.

Mike: One-star review and that’s on supplements and books where I’ve been able to make a lot of good changes to the books and Jeremy and I have been able to make a lot of good changes and just, to whether it be out supplements or how, even copy and stuff, so you know, we really do mind the negative reviews and in the case of supplements and even in the case of books, we’re always reaching out and seeing, can we make this person happy? Is there anything we can do? If they didn’t like the flavor we’re going to send them another bottle for free and if they like that flavor then there’s good chance they’ll go update their review and a lot of people have done that as an update. Hey, I didn’t like they’re fruit-punch but they sent me the green apple and I loved it. And so in terms of books, I’ve had it in many cases where somebody they had a beef with some aspect of the book and I nicely pointed something out to them and said, hey maybe this article will help you. And then you know they revert, it did help them and then they change their review. So a lot of that, it’s just one-on-one, there’s no, again these aren’t…

Jeremy: It’s kind of grindy but it is…

Mike: Yeah, it’s stuff you grind out but it accumulates, over time you get all these little steps in the right direction and then you’ve traveled a long way.

Kunle: Okay, okay. Makes a lot of sense. Okay so just working around visuals and I think strong pillars in online success are down to visuals. People buy pictures and the written word, copy. So from your perspective and your team, what does your team look like internally? So have you got copy writers in-house now?

Jeremy: No.

Mike: Yeah, we do, we have one.

Jeremy: We have one, his name’s Mike. [laughs] All copy is handled directly by Mike, just because, number one, no one knows the brand better than him so it’s going to have the best voice. And two, he writes good copy.

Kunle: Okay. So I suppose, Mike, what advice would you give to listeners keen on putting together effective copy to sell their wares or their widgets online?

Mike: Again, writing is one of those things, whether it’s copywriting or storytelling or how to writing or whatever, is something you have to really study and you have to practice a lot and you have to, in my opinion to be really good at it, you have to have a passion for it because if you don’t, it’s going to come through in your writing. If you’re bored, if you’re writing something in boredom because you don’t care about it or you don’t really like to write, then that is, very likely that is going to create the same response in your readers. So I think that anybody can can learn if they have an intrinsic desire and they go, I really want to learn copywriting, okay good. It’s like that with marketing you know, because marketing is a very creative field in general. If you’re not a very creative person or you don’t personally feel compelled to do it, I don’t really think that you, and I’m saying that impersonally, but I don’t think that person will ever be a great marketer, personally. The best marketers that Jeremy and I know, the people like Neil Patel and like other people we’ve come across in our travels, the best ones are very creative and they’re very passionate about marking, they just love it. They love figuring out how to sell things and, yeah, that’s just their thing. So there’s so much content out there on how to write good copy and good headlines and good bullets and you know, there are books that someone could read like Influence, of course, a book that everyone should read if they’re… Breakthrough Advertising from Eugene Schwartz is a very good book for copywriting the Robert Collier Letter Book is a good book. John Caples is good. So you know, all the traditional stuff. I like, in terms of style, I like Frank Kern’s work a lot, I think he is a very good copywriter.

Jeremy: One of the best for sure.

Mike: Yeah, and at first glance it seems like his copy is almost too simple and dumb, like he didn’t even think about it but that’s not the case at all.

Jeremy: It’s so good, it feels like he’s talking to you.

Mike: Yeah, he’s very good. So there’s plenty of resources out there for learning copywriting but I think first and foremost is if somebody couldn’t get themselves up to do it at all, I think they’d be better off paying someone who really enjoys, who’s a professional and does a good job as opposed to trying to force it out because…

Kunle: How do you find, how do you pick the right professional?

Mike: I don’t know, we haven’t done it. I literally write all copyright, all emails, I write everything. There’ll probably be a point where there’s certain things that we could find someone for but we haven’t gotten there yet.

Jeremy: Yeah. I mean obviously like graphic design…

Mike: Yeah, Jeremy handles all the graphic stuff which you can talk about. Jeremy is Jeremy, so.

Kunle: Yeah, I was just going to go into visuals. How do you co-ordinate visuals, Jeremy? And you have two quite strong brands, your book ocvers are well-designed, they’re compelling, they sell. And when you look at the package design for Legion supplements, again, very, very strong message and it comes across as authentic. So how do you match or pipe in Mike’s copy to reflect on really stunning visuals?

Jeremy: Yeah, good question. So definitely part of it is just what type of brand we want to be. I wanted us to look very professional, I wanted us to look like not just another Amazon brand. Because I feel that something a lot of people do is they get very lazy with their product design. They just kind of get a Fiverr label design or something.

Mike: Or just a 99 Designs thing, but not that 99 Designs is actually bad, we’ve done some stuff with them in the past. But not really taking it seriously enough that that first impression is everything. I mean there was a book I was reading, I think it was called Brainfluence, it was a marketing book. And in it was a study that it was like, people form their first impression within 0.3 seconds or something. And that first impression, they are now just going to think less of everything else that they do on your website and regardless of how great the functionality or when they get into it, still they would give it a lower rating than if right when they hit they’re like, oh that’s nice. And then everything from there now is elevated in their eyes. So that’s also why Jeremy puts so much time into making the website look great. I mean obviously I’m biased but I think it’s the best looking website in our space, like I try to find another website that’s this slick and responsive and just how great is across all browsers and platforms but that’s why he put a lot of time into thinking about that and also of course he can talk now about like, I think you should talk about, Jeremy, just your style, how have you cultivated, because you cultivated a style and eye for what looks good and what doesn’t.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s kind of tough to answer. I guess a lot of it is… I had a conversation with this with Mike’s brother-in-law because he’s a photographer. We just kind of had a discussion just on art in general. A lot of it is just finding influence and things I like for me, it’s just searching around. When I went to redesign our products and get that style that we have now, I know that I wanted it to be black because that felt very sleek to me, very different look. And then from there it’s just I look at every supplement out there and I see what do I like about it, what don’t I like about it.

Mike: I mean looking at websites, you went through so many…

Jeremy: Yeah, I probably looked at a thousand websites when I was designing ours and just finding diffent things that I like about them all and it’s kind of just like good marketers…

Mike: Swipe….

Jeremy: …copy, great marketers steal. So it’s like yeah, there’s a lot of elements of the website that I just saw someone else’s and I said I really like that, how can I integrate that into my design?

Mike: And we’re continually doing that. I mean, I run across things and I’ll email it to Jeremy, hey what do you think about this, this looks cool. And things he likes goes on a list and things he doesn’t like, and you know we go yeah yeah, that’s a bad idea. But I think there’s also to be said, Jeremy, for when you’re in that create mode you got to turn off the critical editor mode. Like, you have to be able to just kind of like, ‘can this work at all?’ think, as opposed to ‘can’t,’ just immediately And that goes back to writing, it’s very important that when you’re writing, you’re writing, when you’re editing your editing. I think there’s something very similar with creativity.

Jeremy: Absolutely, yeah. There’s I don’t even know how many times I’ve been like, let’s try this and see how it looks, and then it looks absolutely awful. [laughs] Definitely happens, no question, you got to just try things. But for me, for example with the products themselves, yeah I was looking at a bunch of repackaging and then honesty I kind of just draw it out, either on paper in MS Paint, or I have a whiteboard in my office, so I’ll just draw things and flesh, play around elements until I like how it looks. And I don’t consider myself like an artist, I can’t draw for shit, it’s really bad. [laughs] But I can make it look structurally how I want it to look and I can…

Mike: Then explain, alright…

Jeremy: Yeah, and then I send it all to my designer who you know he’s good with the Photoshop side of things and making it look pretty. And I say cool, make it look like this and I’ll send them a bunch of different elements from different websites or bottles, like I want this to look like this.

Mike: For instance, all of the labels for the Legion, he will send over, okay so we want this one, you know this one needs to look like, we have a fish oil that’s coming out so we want a fish scale type of look so Jeremy will just find it on the internet and be like all right, this looks cool, I like this pattern here and then if we apply this type of texture and then…

Jeremy: And this type of colour, put it all together, so for me the visual is a lot of honestly looking around and finding inspiration other places and it is a skill for sure and that can be cultivated and I have gotten better at it over time. It’s also looking at things that work, finding sites that you know perform well. I won’t go, if there’s some random website that’s selling things and if I don’t know how much they sell I’m not going to take it as heavily as someone that I know sells a lot of stuff, because I know whatever they’re doing is working.

Kunle: So I suppose it’s that passion for marketing at the first base and then having the vision and then the right team to execute your vision.

Jeremy: Yeah, 100%.

Kunle: Good stuff. Okay. What about social media? You guys are freaking strong on social media, 35,000 followers on Instagram, 72,000 followers on Facebook, 17,000 Twitter followers, 20,000 Pinterest followers. How have you built this out? And how is it impacting on both businesses?

Jeremy: Yeah it’s funny because I consider us to be really lazy with social media.

Mike: We are, to be fair.

Jeremy: Especially, particularly in our space where social media is huge because it’s all visual, it’s all fitness, you want to see people in shape.

Mike: Yeah, like I should have a selfie team.

Jeremy: Yeah, the problem is Mike and I don’t personally really use social media and never have, so there’s a bit of a disconnect there where I’m personally not super interested in it. That’s something we’re this year we’re looking to bring someone on full-time who does love social media and can really step up our game out there but again, I feel bad repeating this but it’s a lot of basics of having a posting schedule.

Mike: Exactly, I mean let’s talk about just Facebook and Twitter for instance. All we really do is we’re just sharing content and again it goes back to a lot of the people generally like the content, the stuff that I write so it gets shared around a lot But as Jeremy said, somebody that is really good at social media and likes social media would look at what we’re doing and be like there’s so much more, they’re passing up so much here.

Jeremy: We do have someone on the team that does run the social media and he comes up with stuff for us, like a drawing contest and stuff like that but…

Mike: It’s not reall his, it’s something he does as a favor to me and Jeremy.

Jeremy: It’s basically a small microcosm of his total responsibility but…

Kunle: I suppose the baseline is, you got that baseline content…

Jeremy: Exactly.

Kunle: …and it’s amplified online, yeah, so you could just take snippets off the back of it and then push up a good image library and you’re good to go.

Jeremy: Yeah, that’s more or less what it was, it was putting together the baseline, the basics, making sure we’re posting consistently, we’re mixing it up between photos and content and different types of content and then we just built out a schedule for every separate social media platform in a Google Sheet and we just stick to the Google Sheet.

Kunle: Okay. Okay, being respectful for your time, guys, we’re going to head over to the lightning round which is pretty much evergreeen questions I ask most guests. And I’ll just ask a question and either of you could answer in a sentence or two, real quick. So what are your future plans?

Jeremy: With Legion, revenue-wise we want to more than double this year, we’re shooting for around $8 million in revenue, that’d be awesome. Wtih Muscle For Life a lot of my time is going to be put on that this year because…

Mike: Full redesign. Full revamp.

Jeremy: Yeah, I’m full-time on Legion last year so this year MFL’s going to get a lot of love at building that out.

Mike: New services, store, all kinds of stuff.

Jeremy: Yeah so that’s kind of the immediate future.

Mike: Yeah, I’ll throw in on the books, Jeremy has been helping on this as well, he’s had a big part in we’re doing a second edition of a one my cookbooks that sells really well, which has been a fun project and going to be starting on another cookbook after that actually, for one-pot cooking which is particularly nice for us fitness people because it’s great to be able to prep a bunch of food once a week and know that the calories and macros are right and the numbers are where they need to be and then you can just eat that stuff every day. And when it’s food that you like, you don’t mind it. So yeah there’s that and then just ramping up more content production. I want to be posting more articles at MFL and Legion and I want to be producing more videos. YouTube is a huge, like rotten, on the ground, low-hanging fruit for us because I think we have 30-35,000 subscribers as it is right now and our YouTube game is pathetic. It’s like I have a podcast that I post once a week essentially that’s a long-ass video, it’s like just what you’re not supposed to do on YouTube. And it has has still gotten us that far, so.

Jeremy: It’s tough to balance all our time, so

Mike: Yeah, and that’s been a thing that we’ve had, I wouldn’t say it’s a challenge, but it is something that we’ve had to learn to navigate and deal with is, now we’re not in a position of like, how are we going to make some money, we’re in a position of, we have so many different opportunities we have to be smart about what we’re committing our resources with. Because as much as we’re willing to work and as much as whatever, you only have so much bandwidth. So you know, we try to do our best on making smart decisions in that way.

Kunle: All right. Next question. How do you guys hire people?

Jeremy: Pretty much through friends, yeah.

Kunle: Okay.

Jeremy: We look for a culture fit.

Mike: First and foremost, that’s worth saying.

Kunle: All right, cool. What are your 3 indispensible tools for managing Legion supplements?

Jeremy: Would that be…

Kunle: Software, anything, it could even be a pen. [laughs]

Jeremy: Good question.

Mike: DaftIn.com is what I write in. I like it, it’s a good online very simple clean screen.

Jeremy: Yeah, Slack is great also. We use Slack a ton for communicating with everybody, all my developers, my graphic artists.

Mike: Our internal team.

Jeremy: Yeah. Honestly like my favourite tool is Hyperdesktop.

Mike: Yeah, Hyperdesktop. [laughs]

Jeremy: He’ll use Google Drive because he’s obsessed with Google Drive, he’s the most organised Google Driver on the planet, I challenge anyone ot go into a duel. And I will use a tool called Hyperdesktop which it allows me to screenshot my screen and draw annotations really quickly. And for going back and forth with my developers and graphic designers, it just makes things so quick on getting changes made and stuff, I love it.

Kunle: Okay. What’s been your best mistake to date? By that I mean a setback that’s given you the highest feedback?

Mike: I guess inventory.

Jeremy: Yeah, inventory management is…

Mike: Hard. Yeah. Because it’s predicting, we’re in such a growth mode it’s hard to predict like, you don’t want to have too much money just sitting in your warehouse for too long but then you don’t want to be just in time because if you have more growth than you anticipated, you run out of stock.

Jeremy: I tell you that’s another big thing on Amazon that I didn’t really mention earlier is that staying in stock for an extended period of time yields massive gains. Amazon really likes that, they really like you to be in stock.

Mike: Like if you can be in stock for six months straight, Amazon is going to give you love.

Jeremy: You build momentum, it’s really good. I haven’t actually seen any specific from Amazon on it but I’ve read different things from people who are very successful at Amazon that there seems to be some kind of shift after about the six-month mark where things just go better.

Mike: Yeah, and it’s probably because their promotion algorithms, you know they are always sending out emails and doing retargeting, doing all kinds of things, so it would make sense that they would give preference to products that don’t run out of stock basically ever.

Kunle: Okay so wrapping up. That’s a really good tip by the way, staying in stock for six months.

Jeremy: It’s hard.

Kunle: It’s tough from a cash standpoint.

Mike: Yeah it’s tough from again, like we’ll have products… our whey protein was selling at a certain level and then we released this new product and new version of it and basically within two weeks it over tripled so you know. And when it takes two months to get, you have to place an order two months in advance of when you’re actually going to receive it, there’s a point where you realize like, oh, and that’s that, we lose, we will be out of stock before we get our new protein.

Jeremy: Yeah, and I know it’s happened a couple other people this space with similar stuff.

Kunle: Okay. Final question. If you could choose a single book or resource that’s made the highest impact on how you view building a business and growth, which would it be? Both of you, to each of you, please.

Jeremy: Single book?

Kunle: Yeah, a single book or resource.

Mike: We’re going to give two.

Kunle: Yeah, go for it.

Jeremy: It’s funny, it’s one of the first books, we do a book club, a Book of the Month club with everyone at the office. Mike will pick a book and we’ll do a group discussion about all the points we liked with it. So one of my favorites so far we did was Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, the owner of Zappos. I love that book, it’s a great book I think on just how important the customer service side of things are. Like he doesn’t consider Zappos a shoe company, it’s a customer service company you know. And that’s definitely been a strong, strong part of Legion and Muscle For Life.

Mike: Because they like to have service, like, make people happy.

Jeremy: And we do the same thing on Legion, I never ever want to leave a customer upset, you know, it’s the worst.

Mike: We will basically do anything to make a customer happy.

Jeremy: Yeah, I will do anything it takes to make a customer happy, because I think that’s important.

Mike: And that was a big lesson from a book called Setting The Table, too. That was Daniel Meyer. He’ll do anything to make his customers happy.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. And then my second book would probably be The One Thing. I really like that book as well. Yeah, it’s just a great book on how important it is to focus on what’s important. Same thing, like we run into so many opportunities on a week to week, month to month basis. Just sitting down and really figuring out what the one thing that’s going to…

Mike: …make all the rest irrelevant.

Jeremy: Yeah, easy or irrelevant. It’s such a simple trick but it’s a brilliant one, it really does work well.

Mike: Yep. Yeah, those are great books, I like them as well and I’ll give two different ones. Peak by Chip Conley, great book. Similar to Delivering Happiness but a bit more cerebral I guess you could say. And cool guy, I’ve had him on my podcast and definitely recommend that for anyone in business. And Good to Great, a classic but a lot of…that’s kind of a high altitude at the 50,000 foot view of what you’re doing but at that planning stage I think it’s just so important because if you’re off by, you know trying to hit that target and you’re off by an inch when you launch and then you know you’ve gone now 10 miles and you’re off by a lot so, I a recommend that if you haven’t read Good to Great, read it.

Kunle: Okay. Good to Great, yeah, awesome, awesome. Right guys, I wish I could spend more time to talk, particularly about customer service which could be for another episode, but you guys have been amazing. Great business, I like your philosophy, I like your ambition, and best of freaking luck, in your language. But so, thank you for sticking to the end, everybody.

Mike: We were tame, we were so not vulgar. You don’t want to hear us when we’re talking. We’re just sitting, like right when we get off the phone I’m going to have to say [beep].

Kunle: [laughs] All right, thank you so much for coming on the show, guys.

Jeremy: Yeah, thank you for having us.

Kunle: All right, cheers. So for our listeners, thanks for sticking to the very end of today’s show and hope you’ve found Jeremy and Mike’s insights on building a double-barrel Amazon business inspiring and you’ve been able to pick up tactics that you would action and apply to your businesses. Because taking action is what you need to actually move the needle. To download the shownotes and read the full transcript, head over to 2XeCommerce.com and for updates and tips to help grow your store be sure to sign up to our email alert list. So until the next show, see you guys later. Cheers, bye.