Insider Tips for Launching and Exiting an E-commerce Business - UpwardBaby | EP. #21

On this 21st episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Andy Lam of UpwardBaby, an e-commerce brand committed to providing busy parents with high-quality and one-of-a-kind baby feeding products. Started as a side hustle back in college, listen to Andy as he shares his journey at UpwardBaby–from discovering sellable products and creating a good brand story to scaling your e-commerce brand by streamlining your business with outsourcing and smart marketing strategies. 

What makes this episode even more interesting is that Andy is the only guest we’ve had on the show who’s in the middle of an exit so you’ll definitely pick up a lot of insights on how to successfully launch and exit from e-commerce business. 

Tune in and enjoy today's episode of The E-Comm Show!

If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to rate, review, and of course, SUBSCRIBE! 

Have an e-commerce marketing question you'd like Andrew to cover in an upcoming episode? Email: hello@theecommshow.com

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Insider Tips for Launching and Exiting an E-commerce Business

SPEAKERS

Andrew Maff and Andy Lam

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff'

About Andy Lam

From microbiological agricultural sciences research to e-commerce entrepreneur. Within the last 4 years, I made the full transition from a life sciences technician to an e-commerce scholar taking a small business from $0 into the multi 7 figure range. Bringing with me the data analysis and lab skills while combining them with newly found marketing, product development, consumer research, and sales strategies I have been fortunate to build UpwardBaby, a fast-growing baby brand that is at the forefront of baby-led weaning in the USA.

Transcript:

00:03

Being able to have fully custom products definitely has snowballed the business year over year. And it's kind of one of the major things that set us apart. This is Michael Epstein. Hi, everyone. This is Ozy from Lotus Linen. This is Andy Lam, from Upward Baby. And you're listening to. If you're listening to The E-Comm Show.

00:30

Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTUskr. The number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew. Hello,

00:51

everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host Andrew Maff. And today I am joined by Andy Lam of Upward Baby Andy, how you doing today? Ready for a good show?

01:00

doing well Andrew very ready, very ready, right though

01:03

there's gonna be a good one. I always love doing episodes like this, where we can just get super deep into a business like yours. So let's do the quintessential opportunity here where you can kind of just give everyone a little bit of an overview of your background, your business, and we'll go from there.

01:16

Sure, my name is Andy, you can find me at the general IG or Instagram @TheOfficialAndyLam  started a small e-commerce business about three to four years ago. And now I'm in the process of selling it. So that's kind of where I'm at at this point in time among other businesses, of course,

01:32

beautiful. So you're in the middle of exiting right now. Correct? That's correct. How's that going? So far,

01:37

it has been an adventure. Something that I did definitely did not think about when I had first started my business. But it is something I'm super excited about moving forward. I think as with most I mean, coming from an Amazon FBA background, a lot of people kind of start that as a side hustle a way to make some extra money. But it ended up turning out to be a lot more than that. And more so a passion and growing something that I'm really proud of. To this day. I have to say yeah,

02:05

nice. So I believe you started this in college, right? You had a job. You started this as a side hustle. And then now it's kind of obviously a full-time thing. Correct?

02:14

Kind of Yeah, so I was born and raised in the Bay Area, San Francisco more specifically, if you're familiar, and you're listening, it's extremely expensive to live in San Francisco. It's probably one of those expensive cities. I went to school in San Francisco grew up in San Francisco, finished school in San Francisco as well found a job. I think I was getting paid like my starting salary was maybe like 35 to $40,000 a year and obviously living there Cisco that's even below paycheck to paycheck. Definitely struggling. Luckily, at the time, I had a friend who I had not met yet at the time, but he's a friend of a friend who was already doing Amazon FBA, and he found a decent, decent amount of success while even he was still working his nine to five at the time, I was working a nine to five, but I was also hustling by scalping tickets. I know it's a very frowned upon the industry. I actually grew that to about a six-figure business as well. Gallery. scalping tickets, yeah. Awesome. So I had a few $100,000 in sales, Galpin tickets, but you know, it wasn't, it wasn't as a very scalable business model. So that's what I kind of took to Amazon FBA, it was definitely out of struggle. But it became something more of a passion and then more something that I grew truly interested in, in the long run.

03:35

So why don't you give us a little insight into what your product line is?

03:40

Sure. Well, I guess to start, I myself, don't have any children.

03:45

That was my next question.

03:48

It's a common question, just because it's like, you know, how did you even get started in this in this niche? Or how did you get into this product selection, but our baby's solely focused right now on baby-led weaning. So it's focused on those transitionary products that help kids start to sell feed, it's become more and more of a trend within the last year or two, where parents are going are skipping the feeding or helping their baby feed were, I mean, sorry, directly into babies feeding themselves. So a lot of the products that we focus on our products that make parents lives easier, a lot less free products, a lot more ergonomic utensils, a lot more attractive utensils that help babies, you know, really want to hold on to the utensils to you know, try to mimic their parents when they're eating. And that's pretty much what the brand is about, you know, a lot of suction products so that the babies are throwing their bowls around and throwing their plates around. A lot of these products have been around for a little bit. But there wasn't a lot of representation in the marketplace, especially on Amazon, we've been able to dive deeper into the lead weaning space, really study the market base consumer base, and create products that were really really made sense and that was very aesthetically pleasing. So things that parents actually wanted in their household, especially parents, my age are a little older. Yeah. But that's kind of how the upper baby-led weaning line came about. And it's, it's become one of the leading brands on Amazon.

05:17

How exactly did you come across this product line? This is if you don't have a child, it's kind of hard to stumble across an open market in the baby area.

05:28

Yeah, that's a good question. Aside from the general market research that most Amazon FBA sellers do, I hope it was I think, in 2018, I was pre-pandemic, I was on a trip to China when the idea of Amazon FBA came about I was like, You know what, as well just kind of scope out some of the markets see what products are out there, what is interested, what seems interesting what may be of use in the US and of profit. So one of the first products that I did see was a food-catching baby, the Felisa full silicone product, very lightweight, very easy to ship, probably very cheap to manufacture. That was my thought process at the time. But I think, after spending some time at the markets didn't really find much. So I decided to kind of scope out some manufacturers, of course, everybody goes on sites like Alibaba. So that was the first thing that I did, and looking for manufacturing product. So that ended up being the first product for our baby didn't turn out to be as profitable as I had, just because that was my first product going in Amazon's people had already been selling it at an even cheaper price point. And it ended up being more competitive than I had originally anticipated. But that was kind of the birth of the upper baby, I had already kind of built the social media, you know, and brand based around it. So I was like, you know, babies are always going to be born, there's always going to be demand for new baby products. And I just happen to stumble upon the growing niche of baby-led weaning. So we no longer sell that exact first product that I had first launched, but we do have a new variation of it that does very well in a feeding set. That's, that's now one of our baby's top-selling products. So yeah, that's kind of how our baby was born.

07:08

So what is what this was you said? 2018. So what kind of tech stack were you using to find? You know, you were doing your own product research into which product line to get into? Yeah, how did you get into that? Yeah, so

07:21

there are tons and tons of software like helium 10, Jungle Scout, which kind of pulls together all of the Amazon data. And using their own algorithms, they'll poop out a bunch of products for you to choose from that that their algorithm deems deemed successful or has a high success rate. Of course, when I was first starting out, I spent hours and hours on this, but then eventually, I realized a lot of the potential was going to come from really just studying the consumer base. So if I was going to focus on baby-led weaning, I really needed to understand, especially because I'm not a parent, I really need to understand what parents were looking for what products made sense, there are tons and tons of baby brands out there that have been around for much longer than our babies. So it really took a lot to understand what was needed in the marketplace and understand be able to provide what was of value within reason for differentiation and then also with room for profit. So I think for us, it was just kind of stressing the point that we wanted to add as much value as we could into our products while being able to differentiate from what was already in the marketplace. Hopefully, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

08:28

So a lot of sellers, you know, or you know, even a lot of big businesses and entrepreneurs, they kind of say like, you have to be passionate about the product that you're selling or the service draw offering or anything along those lines. Were you passionate about baby-led weaning, yours is one of those things that like, as you started to get into it, you realize, like, Okay, you're passionate about some aspect of

08:49

it exactly. As mentioned in the intro, this was completely a side hustle. And I was looking for products that were most profitable for me, for me personally to sell. But as the business started to grow, it definitely became a passion and being able to provide as much value as possible. I think with most businesses, it really comes down to the product and the brand. So just being able to have a brand that I was personally proud of that produced quality products that our social media and our you know, just reviews on Amazon just are a good reflection of what our pipeline looks like if we're able to get reviews that are seeing both negative and positive and we're getting reviews that are positive, saying like, you know, we really love these products, the suction ability works great or my kids won't release the utensils or they just love using it. It definitely means a lot to me in the business. Whereas, you know, if we get negative comments, we take those to heart as well. And we really try to make as many changes as we can to really add as much value and cater to the consumer base as much as possible, especially this age group of parents.

09:53

So getting into a product line like that, like what was your go-to market strategy because like you came in in 2018, so it wasn't exactly As easy as it once was, where you just throw a product up on Amazon start making a ton of money. So how did you kind of get that snowball effect going on a product line that didn't have that much competition?

10:09

Yeah, there's my personal way of being able to kind of create that moat for upward baby. And a way for us to stand out was that almost all of our products are fully custom, whether they may be hand-drawn by myself, and then had models are created by my suppliers, everything is fully custom. Everything is fully custom based on the voice of the customer, as well as reviews that have been left on other competitors. Just to really add a form of creating as much value as possible, as well as getting to the consumer base, as well as creating a differentiation that where other competitors aren't all of our products. I mean, with most Amazon FBA businesses that you'll see and I don't know if you've had other people on this on this podcast, but everybody goes through Amazon FBA courses when they're trying to start an Amazon FBA business. They kind of tell you things that used to work maybe five years ago where you could find a profitable product, maybe change the color, maybe change the quantity or the packaging, but that just doesn't really work anymore. So being able to have fully custom products definitely has snowballed the business year over year. And it's kind of one of the major things that set us apart just because our products don't look like anybody else's on the market at this point in time, at least.

11:33

So then I would assume this would probably be a relatively similar answer. But you know, you started four years ago, you surpassed seven figures a year, you're now going through an exit, like what would you say was your secret sauce to just kind of keep trucking along there and keep the business? You know, growing at that rate?

11:52

is a good question. With most speaking to Amazon FBA, specifically, I know that the E-commerce space is so large. But speaking to Amazon FBA, specifically, if you know how it works, it's really best just stick to what works. Amazon FBA specifically is a very rinse and repeat process. So if you're able to kind of find products that are profitable, within a specific niche to grow your brand, not only will you grow a brand identity, your brand will grow to be one of those recognized names in the space. So with our babies catalog, continuously growing throughout the years, a lot of people have come to Amazon to look for Baby Learning baby-led weaning products from Amazon, specifically, staying within the niche is very important. And sorry, I'm losing track of the question again.

12:46

Like how So you started four years ago, and you surpassed that seven-figure mark, you're obviously now exiting? How is it? Like, what do you think was your secret sauce to kind of get that first seven-figure year is usually a pretty big challenge for a lot of sellers. Yeah. Then once they get over it, it's like the 5 million than the 10 million mark. So what do you think it was that was able to get you over that initial threshold?

13:09

Yeah, yeah. So sorry, just to continue what I previously said, just expanding the product line within the niche that's super important, while also being provided as much value and differentiation in the market as possible. And then I think another really big part is having a good brand story, as well as a strong marketing background. So I myself am not a marketer, I came from a microbe, microbiology, biotech, so research technicians, so not business-oriented, or marketing at all. So more recently, I started Well, ever since I started my business, I ran all of the marketing myself in terms of Amazon Marketing. But within the last few months, I had onboarded a marketing agency, which kind of took the business to another level. So if you're not familiar with marketing, it's always useful to learn up front, just so you know what's going on, when the time comes for you to outsource that. But if somebody else can do it better for you, it's probably a good investment, especially when you're doing e-commerce marketing is a huge, huge factor. So that's something I highly recommend, and probably one of the main reasons for my recent growth for the upper baby. So I think I hit that seven-figure mark, maybe a year and a half ago since then, I think, if I was to have the business by the end of this year, I'd probably be in the mid seven figures, huge growth within a short amount of time.

14:39

So what made you decide to finally outsource to an agency Partially, partially from

14:44

a recommendation from a friend, they had seen really good results, so I was like, it's very worthwhile to us. It's very worthwhile to take a shot, you know, invest in the business, invests in yourself and I am currently running, they're running two other businesses. So I was tired of pulling my hair out, trying to Run rehabs by myself in a mediocre fashion. So prior to using the agency, I was using software that would do the day-to-day optimizations. But I really thought that those were really cutting the business short. And turns out they were, as soon as the agency had taken the product or taken the brand on, they've done wonders. So no complaints on that. And

15:19

nice. So how did you so obviously, that was through word of mouth? But did you do any other kind of due diligence behind this agency? It's always interesting to me how people select some of the agencies that work with Yeah,

15:29

this is the first full-time agency that I've worked with, they were running. I don't know if you're fairly familiar with Amazon DSP, but they were running Amazon DSP for me for a few months. And then my friend was telling me that they were doing really good with regular Amazon sponsored products or sponsored ads. So so then I transitioned on to him and run my ads as well. Okay,

15:50

nice. What about on the like design aspects when you're doing your listing conversations, your ad plus content, all that fun stuff? Do you have someone you work with? Or were you doing that yourself?

15:59

For the most part, I was doing that by myself? I think I didn't start to onboard some team members until maybe six months ago. So for about three years, whenever maybe was way past that seven-figure mark, or sorry, three months? Wait, yeah, for about three years, the upper baby was past the seven-figure mark. And I was running that completely by myself. Listings images, I had a professional photographer that I've worked with for years. So it's been in the product, you take photos for me recently onboarded a graphic designer, so she kind of puts over puts together some of the infographics for me as well, videos are outsourced, of course, because they don't have a child. And I'm not a videographer. But most of that media is outsourced. Listing is self-generated, as well as back-end keywords and things like that. So most of that is done by myself because I really want to be able to tell the story of why we created certain products, and you know what the quality of those products was and why they would cater to the consumer base.

16:58

So I know that you do have a website that you know, upper babies got all their options on is but as most of your focus on the Amazon site, or do you have any focus on Amazon

17:08

at this point in time, it's primarily on Amazon. We have tried a lot of external traffic directed to our personal website. I think for a period of time, we went pretty heavy on it just to kind of test and see where it would go. It has a lot of potentials. Again, I'm just not an expert on the marketing side. So that's something if moving forward, I would have an agency kind of do for me, just because that's a whole nother beast DDC marketplace. I've worked specifically on Amazon Marketing, Amazon product launch, you know how to really market on Amazon. So being able to mark it off, Amazon is a little more work. So for me personally, I'm still pretty new to this space. I was relatively new to the space a lot for me to personally learn on the DDC side, but will come in the next few years. Hopefully,

17:57

did you try any strategies and drive traffic through Amazon from off Amazon? Like I know, I know, a lot of sellers that are you know, solely on the FBA side, they always have like little tiny tricks that they can figure out I know driving traffic from off Amazon if you know, leverage a search term and send it to a certain URL, it can help you rank in certain ways. Like there's a lot of those little like, I don't want to call they're not Blackhat. But like little tricks that a lot of FBA sellers work on like anything like that, that you gave a shot.

18:25

Yeah. Especially early on. I mean, early on, it was a big thing to kind of run like Facebook ads. This is one of the launch strategies, but to run Facebook ads to giveaways to give a giveaway are like huge Lee discounted products. And those giveaways would lead to many chat sequences. It's like an automated messaging bot sequence. And then that would lead to a direct link to a specific search term to purchase the product. Or it'll give instructions to be like, you know, search silicone spatula and lookup for this product under silicone spatula and make the purchase. And then you kind of rank up Amazon's algorithm that way, Amazon's gotten a lot more strict with that. So I really haven't touched those things in such a long time. Just because I personally don't like doing anything risky for the business, although then although plenty of people is doing it still. There are just so many ways for Amazon to figure it out. Now, it's not worth an account shut down, especially for a larger, a larger business, or a large Amazon account. So there are tons of those ways. In terms of direct traffic that is not super black tack Blackhat. I tested Google ads for a little bit. I think the Google Ads weren't directly to Amazon so wouldn't even consider that. There was something like social media we work with some social media influencers, Instagram, Tik Tok. That worked that worked better than expected. It's kind of hard even with Amazon's attribution to kind of check how those just because Amazon attribution isn't quite where it needs to be. opinion, but it's hard to really check to see what's converting. But it does get your name out there. So if you're willing to double down on just kind of building top of funnel traffic, and just getting your name out there, I think it's really valuable to have influencers, micro-influencers, either post your stuff, talk about your stuff, and sometimes it's free of charge or like the exchange for a product. So it's not a bad deal, in most cases.

20:22

Nice. So let's fast forward now to I guess today. So because we've had plenty of sellers on the show, we've had several sellers that have exited, you're the first we've had on the show that's in the middle of an exit and going through that whole process. So what is that been like so far?

20:37

Yeah. So starting the business, I had no idea that people wanted to buy e-commerce businesses, so it doesn't necessarily actually FBA ones. Exactly. So it wasn't always in the back of my mind. And it probably wasn't on my mind, until within the last year, I started getting a lot of cold outreaches. Initially, I thought they were spam. But a lot of aggregators are starting to pop up. As you know, a lot of money's being thrown into the space. And I was getting a lot of calls and emails from companies that were looking to purchase up or baby. And it wasn't, it wasn't really, it wasn't really serious consideration of mine until one of my friends had sold their business, I think for about like 17, after also about three years of building it by himself, which was really impressive, but wasn't really considered until I started also creating other businesses. It's been quite the journey. And I was almost going to accept an offer. But I figured I was selling myself short if I had accepted one of those cold call offers. So I decided to reach out to my friend. And that's when he had recommended me over to the 14 a group whom we're working with now, your brokerage company, they kind of facilitate the entire process, and they help you with marketing and basically the A to Z of selling the business. This is the first business that I'm personally selling. So I didn't want to go into a blind and I figured it would be a great opportunity to be able to work with a broker and the 40 a group or my friend had such good reviews of 40. So that's why I had gone with the 14 groups and you know, since working with them for a few months now. It's been very eye-opening and they've been hurt very helpfully.

22:12

So is that the same friend that told you about the agency? Their partners? So same business? Yeah,

22:18

yeah, kind of Yeah. I mean, he had his own business. My other friend had his own business, but they recently just joined forces on a new brand that's doing very well

22:27

as well. So what are the other two businesses that you started?

22:30

The other one is another E comm. It's I'd probably say it's like 50%, FBA 50%, etc. It's going to be it's actually this brand right here. It's going to be called Badian. But it's like a fishing apparel performance wears brand that is and currently has some products up right now. It's sold out pretty quickly. This is our second product line product launch. That's one of them. The other one is short-term rental completely off e-commerce, but a short-term rental brand that's called co Chrome's going to be an experiential rental Airbnb type business.

23:03

So you're getting rid of one business and starting two new ones.

23:07

Yeah, kind of hopefully not anymore for a while I was running three so yeah.

23:16

Andy, really appreciate having you on the show was great chatting with you. Why don't you take a second here let everyone know where they can find more information about you and yeah, um, for as long as you still have it

23:28

might not be mine for too long. But you can find all of our products on Amazon by just searching for baby or our own personal website, Facebook Instagram. For me personally, I used to be super active on social media but if you're interested in any Amazon FBA specific tips, I was posting videos twice a week on my YouTube channel. If you go on YouTube, The Official Andy Lam it'll probably get you started with a pretty successful Amazon FBA business without having to pay for a course and then Instagram the same @TheOfficialAndyLam but feel free to ask any questions if you have nothing to sell you started a course business. I don't know I do not have time for a course. I do get people asking me questions every now and then. So I'm happy to help where I can no mentorship no course. Feel free to ask me.

24:17

Right. And he thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously. Good luck with your exit. Everyone else thanks you so much. Make sure you tune in next time but rate review subscribe to wherever it is you prefer to listen to us on any podcast platform YouTube, or at theecommshow.com. But as per usual, we will see you all next time, and thanks for tuning in. Have a go and

24:37

thank you for tuning in to the show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. To The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr full-service digital marketing companies specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to BlueTuskr.com now for more info said to make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show