YouSaid · the spoken record

Allen Walton

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120
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2018-12-10
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2018-12-10
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  1. “When I first started in 2014, the conference that really kicked things off for me was internet retailer. It's an annual event in Chicago.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “And everybody's always concerned about what Amazon's doing and how to counteract it. And so you go to these conferences where just other like-minded people are going to be and you strike up conversations. And I have tips for conferences if you want to get at some point.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So there are conferences that you can go to for pretty much any industry that you're interested in. I mostly go to e-commerce related conferences where there's people who are selling stuff online. That's the thing that we have in common. I don't go to any industry events for like spy gear or surveillance stuff. I used to, but I don't really like it. The e-commerce events are really helpful because most people there are willing to share what they know and they're excited about it and they're not concerned about people stealing their idea quotes to they're not worried about that sort of thing. They're in their business. They're already running big teams. They're looking to grow even further and e-commerce is changing pretty constantly. There's always like new things to try.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Out there. It's really easy to say that when you're first starting out. But there are people out there, like a lot of people out there that are doing interesting things that you want to be a part of and they're willing to let you in on that world. And so Let's talk about going to events first.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Probably through referrals. Most of the stuff that I do now in companies that I hire, I usually hear about from other business owners.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I didn't outsource the whole paid traffic thing soon enough. Like that's a very brain intensive task, like dumping a bunch of data into Excel and analyzing it and finding out what keywords we're performing and which ones weren't. I let that go on autopilot for far too long and it probably cost me a lot of money, like just six or seven months after I started my business. But I was so inundated with all these, you know, menial tasks that I didn't go back to the thing that was actually like making me money, which was all over the paid traffic that was coming in. And so I would have outsourced that significantly sooner to somebody who really, really knew what they were doing.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “It's kind of updated for organizations that are not as, they don't have as much hierarchy. It's more for 2018 businesses where they're like more flat.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yeah, the one that comes to mind instantly, like the instant you said that was one that I only read like a couple months ago. I wish I picked it up sooner because It's called the one minute manager They have a new one. It's called The New One Minute Manager.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “There's all sorts of niche ones. So if you're a programmer or if you're just a customer service person or if you want to work in content marketing. That type of thing, then there are a lot of niche job boards for opportunities like that.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It's called Dynamite Jobs. And the website's DynamiteJobs.co. There's no M. The guy that wanted the dot com wanted too much money, probably. Yeah, so full disclaimer, this is run by some friends of mine, but it's for people who are looking for apprenticeships or jobs where they're giving like a meaningful role. They're not just clocking in and doing the nine to five type of thing. This is for people who they want to work remotely, they want to learn things, and they're able to, a lot of them choose to live like in Southeast Asia because the cost of living is so low that their high quality, they're affordable, and they also want to work for companies that are doing interesting things. And so I've gone through and I've looked at a lot of jobs that are on there, and I'm like, hey, this would have been amazing for me before I started this entrepreneurship thing. I totally would have done that. There's another one called remotive.io, and then we work remotely is another one.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Yeah, I wouldn't have hired a friend. And I know a lot of other business owners that feel the same way. It's not for everybody. I mean, I'm sure some people can make it work, but it was very difficult for me because I ended up having to just have like uncomfortable conversations and stuff and it kind of hurt the friendship a little bit. So I did that wrong. And then if I were going to go back and do it again, I would have There are a couple of options that are available now that weren't really available a couple years ago that have worked out really well for me.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Exactly So I knew that was a priority, and my friend had no marketing experience whatsoever, but he's a really nice guy, and he hated his job, and I needed somebody to commiserate with, like on the whole entrepreneurship front. And I'm like, you know, maybe he can just kind of be an apprentice type of person. I'll teach him what I know, and then he'll go on and do something else. And all the while, like, he's helping me, you know, build a company. And then that's when I realized that I had no idea what I was doing with managing people. Like, this guy knew nothing about my industry. He didn't know anything about marketing. And I'm like, wait, I have to teach him all this stuff or get him courses and books and things like that. This is going to be a huge drag. And so he worked for me for like a couple of months, but he ended up going back into his industry, which is HR, just because it paid significantly better than I did”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Yeah, I think that was a full year after I hired the first one. It was a friend of mine. That was probably the first place I went wrong. It was a good friend of mine who was also unhappy with his job. And I don't know, I think it's because I really wanted to help him out and I needed somebody to help out with my company too. I was still spending a lot on paid advertising. And I'm like, man, I haven't had any time to focus on SEO related tasks and projects.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “No, I definitely had to learn how to do it. I had to learn that on my next employee because the first one was a guy that trained me. And so he was pretty much autonomous. He could just do his thing and I didn't really even have to think about it at all. But then when I had my second employee, that's kind of like, oh, so this is why everyone complains about managing employees and having teams and just, I know so many entrepreneurs that say that running, managing the team is like the hardest part of their job and finding employees. And I totally get that now. That was the lesson that most people learned on the first employee. For me, that was my second one.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “It was just impossible for me to do things from the third floor of my apartment. And so Vince has a house with a garage. And I'm like, hey, he can take care of all the shipping and all of the phone support and do live chats and stuff for me. So I just like really offloaded stuff to him, which was great because when he wasn't on a call, then he could be placing the orders throughout the day. He didn't just have to wait until like two or three PM like I was because the inventory was just hanging out in his garage. And so he became my fulfillment guy in addition to the customer service. And so I finally got all the inventory stuff out of my hair.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, I'm still doing the picking and packing, but at least I wasn't taking as many phone calls until we grew to the point where we were getting more phone calls and then I have to get on the phone again.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “It was great. I mean, he worked from home. So, we don't live in the same city at all, but through the wonders of the internet, you know, I was able to make it so that if somebody were to call 800 number on the website, then it would ring him on his computer. And that's all he did at the time, was just customer service.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And it takes a lot of customer knowledge, and I just didn't have it in me to teach anybody else what I knew. So I went to him and it was an opportunity time for him and so we decided to make that happen. Like in I think it was like the February or March of 2015?”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “It was May 2009. I got hired at that store and they had four locations at the time. In each location had its own sales manager. And so my first week of the job each day was at a different store in North Texas. And on Friday, I remember it being on a Friday, I went into the location that he still works with me. His name's Vince. And I remember going into Vince's store and he was teaching me about setting up the CCTV like DVR so they would like record on motion. And then he had like a, you know, eight camera package system that he was closing the sale on. And so he was packing up all of the cameras and the cables and the power supplies. And then he showed me like how the GPS trackers work. And I didn't know who else to turn to because this is kind of a weird industry.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, ex And so there's a palette somewhere with my products on it, and they'll pack it for me and ship it out. It's usually like a flat rate, but it was going to really eat into the margins. And so I was just like, Know, I can't be on the phone all day anymore. I really need help. But phone, I mean, phone orders make up like 20% of our sales. So I can't just turn off the phone really. So I decided to go back to one of the guys that actually trained me in the surveillance industry.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm like, you know, I really want to quit it with this post office thing. I don't really know what to do. The 3PL, the third party fulfillment fees, if I were to have somebody else take this over from me, would just be far too high.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I don't know that there was a specific day. I just remember the general feeling of dread I had whenever two or three p.m. would roll by and I'm like, oh my gosh, the phone hasn't stopped ringing. I have to pack all of these orders. I gotta go to the post office, which was just such a drag going up and down the stairs of my apartment, and then also just, I had to wait in line at the post office just to give them a bag full of like a trash bag full of stuff. They want to let me drop it off. So I might be there for like 15 to 20 minutes until they'll accept the packages. And yeah, I realized that it was taking up too much of my time. And I was still kind of referring back to the four hour work week every couple months. I'd kind of like go back and be like, okay, what am I not doing right here? And I realized that I wasn't kind of offloading the $10 an hour tasks so that I could focus on the 100 or $1,000.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “That we know our customers are going to love, that they're not going to want to return, that are easy to provide tech support on, and that's worked out really well for us.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “It's a difficult industry, and because you have to give like tech support to customers. Whereas with other things like soft goods, like bags and clothing and stuff like that, those do have high return rates, but you don't really have to touch the customer at all. Whereas with tech support, that's like a huge customer service thing. And so I only, when I started and I still do, we only carry stuff that we really, really like, and that's high quality so that when our customers get it, they're not really irritated. That's like, you know, a piece of crap electronic that's like barely working that was imported from China or something like that. If you were to go to Amazon and type in Spy Camera or something, most of the stuff that's listed is only two and a half stars, three stars. It's being sent directly by the factory in China, and they don't offer tech support at all. And so we try to just carry problems.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, and that's something we still do. So a lot of my competitors, a lot of people just want to sell anything and everything they possibly can. But I sell electronics and electronics are really difficult to”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “It would have taken like two weeks or something like that for the customer to get it. Also, the So, some of the factories just straight up wouldn't even do that for me. They weren't willing to do, you can kind of think of it as like a drop shipping model. Where once the item is sold, then you actually purchase it from the manufacturer, whoever's distributing it, and then they'll ship it on your behalf. And so some of my suppliers didn't want to do that. And so I would actually have to put in an order for like 100 or 200 units or something like that in order to actually have that inventory to sell to the customer.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Yes, and that's really popular with FBA sellers right now. FBA stands for fulfillment by Amazon. So that's a really hot business model at the moment where a lot of companies, they list products that are currently being made in China. They'll list those on Amazon. And then when the item sells, they'll just pick up they'll just email the factory and say, hey, I need you to send this package over to my customer in California or whatever. And they'll get it within like a few days. And it only costs a couple dollars. Whereas for somebody to actually have inventory in Texas and then ship it to California, it actually costs more than that.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “So that's when you order stuff. It's really popular with Chinese factories. They'll actually just start listing products that they sell on Amazon. And then it's subsidized by the United States to send extremely cheap packages very quickly So it actually costs only a couple dollars to send something from Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen. They'll send it over to the US for just two or three dollars or something like that.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Yeah, it was out of a bank account. Yes, and so there are a couple reasons why I had the inventory there. Number one was. It was coming from overseas, and I didn't know how the whole epacket thing really worked.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Very well. And yeah, so I decided to hire an employee. And I guess that was about six or seven months after I started the company. Just to help with customer service.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Yeah, I was doing live chat Live chat, phone call, and then picking and packing orders all at the same time. And I remember I mean one of my favorite stories to tell was going out to lunch. I went to In and Out and I was doing three live chats all at the same time and then I had a customer place like a $2,000 order like while they were in a live chat with me and I'm like sitting it in and out eating a burger. I'm like, man, this is crazy. Like I never would have thought that something like this were possible. And so I was doing all of those things at the same time, and I was neglecting the Adwards campaign entirely because that was just very data driven and I didn't have the, I guess, the bandwidth to go in and analyze all of this stuff. And so I've kind of let that go on autopilot for a couple of months. And that doesn't really work.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “That was so beneficial because beyond the other side of a counter from the customer and they'd come in and they'd say, I've got this problem. Like I think somebody is. Abusing my parent in Alzheimer's home. Or I think something's going on with my kid. They're autistic. I think the other kids are like bullying them. What do you have for that? And so I would be able to gauge how they felt about certain products and just pick them with the perfect dietem. So when they called, I already knew what most of their problems were and it allowed me to just definitively say like this is the thing that's going to solve your issue. And so, yeah, where were we going from?”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “And so November's rolling around, and I'm like, I can't do this anymore, just packing orders is taking up like two to three hours of my day. And all while I'm also answering phone calls, because I have my phone number bright and center at the top of the webpage, as soon as people land on it, everyone can see the phone number, whereas most e-commerce stores actually try to hide it. I wanted people to call because I knew I could close them over the phone. And so they would call and I'd be.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “It's not a UPS store, it's like a private mailbox. They would accept the shipment for me and then I'd have to go pick it up, these huge boxes. I'd have to get them in my wife's car because my car wasn't big enough to carry all of it. And then I'd have to carry it up three flights of stairs into the bedroom and then unpack it and there would be cardboard dust and all sorts of crap everywhere. It was like a mess. And then I'd have to go back downstairs and throw away all the cardboard. And this was my life for like six months. By the time that, let me think. By the end of the year, I started the business, I had my first sale like in May. Oh, this is in 2014.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Alright, so when we went live, I had about 10,000 in inventory scattered across the bedroom, and I was fulfilling all the orders myself. So around three PM each day I would, you know, stand up, start looking for whatever it was that customers had ordered, and then pack it, and then I'd have to throw it into the back of my car and drive to the post office. And I did that every day for about six months or so. And then it became a huge issue because my car couldn't hold enough, like the trunk wasn't big enough to hold all the packages. And then I was also living on a third floor apartment, and I'd have to drive to the post office. And then when I was purchasing inventory from overseas, they'd ship it to a private mailbox that I had. It was like a”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, it was the limit that I'd set just to make sure I didn't suddenly spend a couple thousand dollars Because I made some really tiny mistake, like I had a dash somewhere. That shouldn't be there So we're spending about $100 to $200 a day. I had a cap on it, so we wouldn't go over that until I could look at the numbers and then make sure that we were actually profitable. And it kind of took off from there. We started spending a little bit more money. We started getting more data from Google, like how people were finding us, like exactly the keywords that they were typing in, doing some A-B testing with the ad itself. So we would change the copy of the ad or like the headline of the ad. To see which perform better. And yeah, things really took off once I started.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “So people were placing orders. I remember we were probably spending about $100 to two hundred dollars on AdWords each day and getting no organic traffic at all. And so”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “My wife hated it. And yeah, so I also had packing supplies because you got to get customers their stuff, right? So I'd have Boxes and packing paper and envelopes and everything like that.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “And so I was like too cheap to buy shelving for it too. So it's just scattered everywhere all over the floor and up against the walls and stuff”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “Yeah, I think as of the first day that we went live, we were probably getting like ten orders a day. And yeah, this is in my second bedroom, and I don't I have ten thousand dollars worth of inventory in this bedroom. And”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “It was a voice recorder, it's just a really small, it's not even, so we sell concealed recorders like hidden inside of a pen, for example. But this one is just a really small recorder with a long battery life, and for whatever reason, customers really like it. And that was the first item I sold.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Remember sitting down in their living room and I was like, I casually mentioned that I was like quitting my job or whatever to start a business. And, you know, pretty much everyone, when you say that, they instantly kind of, I don't want to say they judge you, but a lot of them are like, are you sure you really want to do that? Because, you know, it's a stable income. Maybe they think you'll fail or something like that. But I felt like I had a lot of people that weren't entirely sure with my decision. And so I remember explaining to them like, Yeah, so this is how Google Ads works. And like, I lost them as soon as I mentioned that. But they're”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “I don't think it was a particularly difficult conversation. She had a job at the time, and it was like okay money. It wasn't amazing or anything like that, but we had money saved up from my job and then her income. So I figured we'd be able to get by if this didn't pan out. And she knew I was really unhappy. And Know she was cool with it. I had to explain it to her parents, though, who were much more skeptical.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “I probably just needed to push it live. And so I remember it was May 23rd. I turned the campaign on at like 3 a.m. I'm like, all right, it's time to make this thing happen. Then I go to bed and then I wake up at like 7 a.m. and I roll over and look at my phone and I have a notification from Shopify saying that I made my first sale for $149 and I let out this huge like orgasmic noise. I was like wow like everything's gonna be okay. Yeah So it was like a huge just validation that I had it in me to do the entrepreneur thing, I guess.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “So, yeah, it was just getting the website to be good enough that I could turn the ad campaign on and then people would come to my website and make a purchase. And as long as I was breaking even in the beginning, I would have been happy. So I could cover the cost of the product that I was selling, cover the cost of the ads that I was paying for. And yeah, I turned my ad campaign on I had started working on the business in March. For some reason it took me like an additional two months to make it go live. I think it took more time than I realized to get going and I remember thinking, oh my gosh, I'm going to have to like find a job or something before this website launches. I was probably just being a little too perfectionist.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Trying to optimize my Google ad campaigns before they went live because I didn't want to turn on the campaign and then go to bed and then all of a sudden I spent like $7,000 overnight. Yeah, that's not.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Yeah, so I would write product descriptions. I would be editing the photos. So taking photos, uploading them, making sure everything look good. I did this all with a, it was a $140 theme on Shopify. Which is amazing because I remember. At a previous company that I worked for, we spent like $30,000 on a website. And it was so difficult to edit and make the way you wanted. For $140, you could get a theme that was really, really good. It was already optimized for conversions and easy to edit. And so I just remember being so stoked that I was able to get this thing up and running for only a few hundred dollars. And so writing webcopy, taking photos.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “I listened to two albums. The first one was an album called The Master Plan by Oasis. And then, what was the other one? It was welcome interstate managers by Founds of Wayne. I don't know why, but I would just have those on repeat. It was good for working. And so I would be writing product descriptions. And I remember I bought like a dollar Kindle book and learn how to write product descriptions. And it was difficult, but eventually.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “So I built up the website, and to that I needed to take product photography. I didn't have any unique images at all. So one of the things I'd recommend is if you're using manufacturer images, that's a terrible, terrible thing to do. You really need to be taking your own product images. You can do it much better, and it's good for SEO and other things like that. So I bought a little, what do they call it, a white box where you stick the product in. And then I took photos of it. And then I remember I did all of this from a two bedroom apartment in Richardson, Texas. It's a suburb of Dallas. And I just remember staying up really late. My wife would come in and kiss her good night and then I'd put on Spotify. I'd have music that I'd listen to like the same stuff over and over again.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “I will teach you to be rich as another resource that I've used a lot. Ramit Sati's. He has courses that I found really helpful, specifically the one on copywriting Learned how to write significantly better through that course. 22 immutable laws of marketing was fantastic for just learning about what sets brands apart and how to position yourself and why it's important to try and create a category. And how there's different strategies that you can employ. He also wrote 22 immutable laws of branding, which I thought was really good as well, but doesn't get as much attention for some reason.”

    2018-12-10 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #351: Real 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies — Allen Walton and SpyGuy, The Path to Seven Figures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT