Transcript
Hey guys, welcome to Launch and Scale. This is episode seven. In this episode, we are taking a look at what is the best route to market for your product. A while there are several types we could talk about, two that I come across most in the eCommerce space is do you launch your product on Amazon first or do you launch on Kickstarter first? This is the question that was inspired by Stein Devolder. He asked, really, what are the benefits of first launching your brand on Kickstarter and then going to Amazon instead of just launching your brand on Amazon? And so that is an awesome question. I wanted to dedicate an episode to that. And keep in mind if you guys do ... If you have a question that you want to be answered on the show, you can do so by going to khierstyn.com/ask, how you spell that is K-H-I-E-R-S-T-Y-N dot com slash ask, and you'll be able to ask a question through a voicemail or email it in and then we'll be able to cover it on a future episode. So which one should you start with? Should you do Amazon or should you do Kickstarter? And I think that really depends on where you're at in your journey. If this is your first product, then the question is going to be, do I start on Amazon or do I start on Kickstarter? But what if you are already selling on Amazon? What does that look like? So I get, I think my audience is an even split between those that sell on Amazon and they're looking at building a brand off of Amazon for reasons I'll get into in a second. But then I have first-time product creators that want to get their product online and they're like, do I do Kickstarter? Do I do Amazon? And so we'll get into that, as well. In terms of benefits of Amazon, Amazon is a global marketplace, so it gives you the same benefits as Kickstarter does in that it gets your product in front of people that otherwise may not have known or caught an opportunity to learn about your brand. So I think that way, as a marketplace, it is extremely powerful and you should, if you're selling a product online, you should absolutely be on Amazon. But having your product exclusively on Amazon has its drawbacks. Where Amazon could be a really great place to get started online, if you white label a product, whereas you go to Alibaba, you find an existing product and then you put your label on it and create a brand and sell that exclusively on Amazon. That is a great way to get into selling online. However, it has its drawbacks because as you start to scale on Amazon, you don't have complete control over your listing. Essentially, Amazon owns all your customer data. So you don't have a direct way to contact your customers. And you are very susceptible to price wars on Amazon. Where when if you first go into a category where it's very profitable and there isn't a lot of competition on your product, very soon, competitors are going to come in and start undercutting your prices, which means it's a very quick race to the bottom for you. With Amazon being a go-to marketplace, it is a great place to get started, but it's extremely competitive and it is very volatile. So you can get your listing shut down at any point. You don't own customer data. And it's really not, it's not safe, essentially, to have your brand only on Amazon, in my opinion. And while there are ways around it, I believe the best way to build a foundation and a legacy for yourself and your family online is to have complete control over where your product is listed. So that's why I, regardless of whether you're on Kickstarter or Amazon, you 100% need to have a spot where your product lives online, be it your own website. So regardless, again, Kickstarter, Amazon, you need to be building yourself a spot offline. So the reason I get a lot of Amazon guys coming to me is that they understand the risk they take by only selling on Amazon and they want to be able to expand, to be able to scale and build a brand. Because building a brand, if you go back to episode...
