New Era Reseller
New Era Reseller is the podcast for regular people who want to build a real income using arbitrage strategies, without gimmicks, gurus, or guesswork. Each week we break down the moves that work right now: how to find products that actually sell, how to read the data so you stop guessing, and how to price and restock for steady profit.
But this is not only about the numbers. Building a business builds you. So alongside the tactics we talk about the habits, mindset, and small daily wins that turn a side hustle into something that lasts.
This is for people who want to build a predictable, sustainable, scalable source of income, without feeling like they are putting money into a slot machine. No hacks. No tricks. Just real business principles, and a practical playbook for building a business, and a life, you are proud of.
New episodes every week. Follow so you never miss one.
New Era Reseller
It's a Metal Detector, Not a Treasure Detector
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Your sourcing tools beep on everything. That does not mean everything is treasure.
In this episode we unpack one of the most important mindset shifts in arbitrage: the scanner, the app, the data, they are a metal detector, not a treasure detector. They tell you where to dig. They do not tell you what you will find. The moment you treat every beep like a guaranteed winner is the moment you start losing money.
We cover:
- Why the tool finds signals, not sure things
- The quick checks that separate the treasure from the scrap metal
- How to stop chasing every beep and start digging in the right spots
- The habit that turns guessing into a repeatable system
The takeaway: let the tool narrow the field, then do the judgment yourself. That is how you buy with confidence instead of hope.
New episodes every week. Follow so you never miss one, and if this helped, send it to someone who is building something.
Run your own numbers. The Profit Tune-Up is free. Upload your Amazon or Seller Board data, or even a Seller Board screenshot, and get the same review Brian runs in a live coaching session. officialolsons.com
Everything else lives in one place. The newsletter, the coaching, the community, and the rest of the tools are all at officialolsons.com (all O's, no E's).
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The New Era Reseller is part of the Modern Builders Network, hosted by Brian and Robin Joy Olson.
Become undeniable.
Welcome back to the Modern Builders Network. We are the official Olsons. I'm Brian. And I'm Robin Joy. And this is Coach's Corner.
SPEAKER_01Hey everybody.
SPEAKER_00Hey, how's it going?
SPEAKER_01It's going great. I was uh telling somebody yesterday, every day of my life just keeps getting better than the day before. I am just loving our life.
SPEAKER_00Feel exactly the same way. I don't know what we've earned it, I guess, right? Like just, and we're in this prime time right now of our lives. This is like the best time. That said, we've been hearing a version of the story a few times now, and I want to just talk about it here real quick and maybe we can get out of the way. Okay, what story is that? So a builder will pull their Arbasaurce ASINs that they've matched. They look at uh a few of them. I don't even know how they're doing the evaluation, but um, and look at the surface and see that, you know, like the profit history looks fairly flat. And so then they decide that the whole list is worthless and start trashing the the list of leads that they got.
SPEAKER_01And um We've heard a few versions of this lately.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so they're basically saying it's not worth the time to put in to the database and that they're bad leads.
SPEAKER_01Okay. Yeah. Well, I would say they're not they're not bad leads.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Say more about that.
SPEAKER_01Okay. I don't consider them to be leads at all. All we're doing in Orbis Arborce is matching an ASIN with a source. That is one task, and then deciding whether the whether they are test worthy or not. That's a completely separate task. So finding leads that match up, I want a big database of those because only a few of those are going to be testable. Yeah. And then testing ASINs, only a few of those are going to turn into replenishables. So I gotta have a whole bunch that don't work. When we look at it with the Pareto principle, ideally you would have 80% that don't work and 20% because 20% of your income comes from 20% of your work. Yeah, that's it. I always get it backwards, but you all you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so we're gonna do the whole episode on this.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Ready?
SPEAKER_01I'm ready.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, Arbasaurus is not there to give us good ASIN. That's not they never offered to do that. That's not what that's for. They're there to give you the source. Remember long time ago, back in the 1900s. No, no, no, not in the 1900s.
SPEAKER_00Back in the 1900s.
SPEAKER_01Uh actually, in the 2000s, when we started our business, 2018.
SPEAKER_002018.
SPEAKER_01We had to find ASINs, and then we had to go and find sources all manually.
SPEAKER_00Or vice versa.
SPEAKER_01It was a manual, yeah, or we'd find and go find some ASINs to match the source. And it was a manual process, and that was the first step. You can't do anything until you have a source. Right. Right. And if you have a source, you don't can't do anything until you have ASIN and match it, match those things. And that's the sourcing step.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01End of story.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Then we test it.
SPEAKER_01Then we test it, right?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01Now that process.
SPEAKER_00Well, we decided whether any of those were worth testing. And then we would test it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right. The ones that work. Yeah. We still had to find a whole lot. Yes. Match up a whole lot before it mattered.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Now we have these tools that are wonderful. They're amazing. You put in your ASINs and they give you the sources. You put in your source and they give you the ACNs. It's time travel. It's what you call time travel, right? Yeah. It has collapsed that time that it used to take to do that. Trust me, you feel like you're spending hours if you just started in 2026. You probably are, but we had to spend probably 10x as much. 10x as much just to get to the point where you're starting to feel bad about it.
SPEAKER_00And it was uphill both ways.
SPEAKER_01In the snow dragon, the bus behind us. The point I'm trying to make is the job that Arbisource in these other matches, she hasn't Arbisource is not the only one, is not to give you good acence. It's to give you sources for acences, right? Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So sometimes it feels like, well, the tool, you know, didn't deliver what what you had hoped it would. But what's really happening is that the tool delivered the part that, as you said, used to take you all night or your whole weekend or whatever, and left you with the two parts that have always been the job, which is determining whether it was test worthy, and then testing it. These are the things that have always been. It's always been your decision. It's always been your decision.
SPEAKER_01Not a tool's decision.
SPEAKER_00And don't forget, I think one of the critical things that people are leaving out of all these tools is that you only want to be sourcing brands that you have no love and trust from sources that Amazon accepts documentation from. That's it. And if you are scanning these gray market suppliers, then you're going to get yourself in trouble, right?
SPEAKER_01I would say also about the brands. If you're just trolling Amazon for any possible thing that you're approved to sell, any possible brand you're approved to sell, you could get in real trouble there because a lot of those brands are not good brands. Yep. So in the modern builder stack, you took only good brands and you verified them with the USPTO. Like these are only good brands. So there's a good place to start. Several ways to do it, but be careful.
SPEAKER_00Arbisource or any of those other tools, they're not just designed for Amazon. They're designed for multiple marketplaces. And so just because you wouldn't source from one of those gray market suppliers for Amazon doesn't mean you wouldn't source for it for a flea market or eBay, some other platforms, right? Yeah. So I think sometimes people want, they treat it like it's a slot machine. What happens most of the time with a slot machine?
SPEAKER_01You aren't going to lose more than you win.
SPEAKER_00You lose way more than you win, right? And you know, like, oh, I and you pull the lever four times and you don't get a win, you're like, oh, these slot machines don't work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Right?
SPEAKER_00Well, we all know slot machines don't work. But Arbasaurce or whatever the bulk matching tool is that you're using, it works. Trust me. We use it. Our business is on it. It absolutely works. You need volume. You need to be undeniable in your approach. And if you are hoping for the jackpot type thing where you, oh, you pull the button and you found 120 winners, that's not how this game works.
SPEAKER_01I don't know of a tool that does that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I think something that's that's missing from those conversations is is nobody's telling us they're saying they didn't like the ACEs, but they don't work. They're not telling us, did did they test them? Did they meet the three-step check? Did they was there any other thing about them? They just said this looks bad.
SPEAKER_00What are what are their targets? Are they shooting for 100% ROI? I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well then yeah, a lot more of them are gonna look bad.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's like it's a one, it's a just a surface level glance, basically, and then we're categorizing the whole tool this way, right? Yeah. I just think it's a good idea.
SPEAKER_01Because you're gonna use Keepa, yeah, a one-dimensional tool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Now there was one comment that was uh something like, well, they've never been profitable. Again, you don't know if a nascent's profitable until you sell it. You know, profitable is a projection, potential. None of them, if none of them have ever had potential profit, then that's still not the answer, so long as you've got capital protection.
SPEAKER_01As long as they got capital protection and velocity.
SPEAKER_00So capital protection implies there's a chance for some profit. And so, but again, what are you basing your business on?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00You have no idea what your assumptions were.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so again, just a bit unfair.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Okay. So another thing that's not being mentioned in these conversations is how many of those ASINs that didn't look good or they looked like they had all tanked or whatever, how many of those were back ordered? And that's why they take of people who don't understand how to do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That tends to be something that nobody uh else is really looking for.
SPEAKER_00Yep. Basically means that the offer is live, like your item is available to purchase, right? But it's not in the prime window. It's not physically available to ship to a customer yet.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00So what happens is sellers don't understand how this works. And they're like, why is my item available? I'm not getting any sales. I must need to lower my price. And they're lowering their price, and it's usually not about the price. And then we get it in this panic pricing window where everyone's because repricers, they're fighting over each other on the way down, right? And I'm not saying this is on every ASIN, but you'd be surprised. We okay, we're reviewing ASINs with coaching clients constantly, consistently, with frequency. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Oh, confrequency. Con frequently.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I'm telling you, more times than not of the ACINs we're reviewing them, that is absolutely the case. Sometimes another thing that happens is the price doesn't look good to you because you're looking at whatever the price is, and there's one or two offers on there, and maybe one or two of them are FBM, and there's a real opportunity for you to come in as an FBA seller and get your price, but you won't know until you test it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and you know, you're using, like I said before, you're using a one-dimensional tool to decide whether there is any more. You decided this was worthless based on a one-dimensional buy box. Well, let me tell you, this is ceasing to be the case, except for those really fast-moving ACNs. The sweet spot for us is there is stuff missing from warehouses all over the country, completely different prices depending on where you are. And I haven't seen a lot of tools that can show that, but Path Profit Zones does.
SPEAKER_00Whose paper?
SPEAKER_01Whose paper.
SPEAKER_00Let me tell you what it let me tell you what it can look like. If you if in the business world, we have this thing called the watermelon effect, which everything the numbers look good on the outside, but if you really start digging in, it's red on the inside. Okay, you will find that the Amazon marketplace is often exactly the opposite, where it's red on the outside, but green on the inside. And let me tell you how this works.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00Okay. You're looking at this one dimension that Keepa is giving you, the one-dimensional buy box. Even historically, it's only one dimension. Yeah. We don't know what location that might be and if they vary that at all. We just don't know. We did some research to figure out what the heck was going on there. And we did unpack that. Um, but it's also so it's one number. Sometimes it's just a single point in time. People look at the current price and go, yeah, well, this doesn't work. That's the total, that's the total thing, the wrong, right? But those that red can be based on a national average. That's the that's the price that Keepa is showing you, right? Or that's the price that Keepa is showing you in one part of the country. That's the one-dimensional information that we're talking about. You open up the the point is crack that thing open and actually take a look. And so this requires a little bit more work and a little bit more understanding of how the marketplace works and how distribution channels work and things like this, right? So you can absolutely have a red national average of a price with many green options in between.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that's a good point, Brian. I think that we should remember that we cannot have any proof of what's going to happen for us until we test. We do not have all the information. Yep. The information includes us being in there, but keeper is very little of the information that we could get. Do not treat it like the verdict.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01It's not. It is information tells can help us decide whether to test or not, but it is very one-dimensional. There's very little information compared to what you need to replenish.
SPEAKER_00I can't think of anything that isn't a verdict unless it is an actual sale that happens and it's done. But even that is a point-in-time verdict.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00There's nothing that says, oh, this is never going to work, and there's nothing that says this is always going to work. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yep. You have to test it just like any other business. There's not an easy button that says, hey, we got a tool that tells you this is going to make you money. It's not like that. No business is like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I don't think you can expect it.
SPEAKER_00There may be only a couple of offers on there. We typically are not counting the offer count, but offer type is something that I do pay attention to. And if it's the FBM that's holding the buy box and there's no real FBA presence, that's a green light for me as long as everything else about that listing is. Those are kind of the things that we these are the ACEs you're looking for, right? Are the the ones that nobody everyone else has passed by because it looks like oh, there's no opportunity here.
SPEAKER_01Well, I want to I want to go back just a little bit and mention that when there are only a few sellers, there's only a little bit of stock. Yes. Sometimes it's not selling any faster than that, or there's room where you could test because there's not enough stock to keep up with how much it would sell. It's not going to show sales that didn't happen, and sales are not going to, you can't sell something that wasn't there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So keep in mind there are dimensions that you have to understand and learn from. And this is the experience part. That's right. Right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay. So the you can go forward and the out of stock, the back ordered, none of that means that there isn't competition. Right. It just means that the number that you're looking at isn't telling you necessarily the whole story. These are two different claims, and we're only making one of them when you make that decision.
SPEAKER_01So the price history is a record of what keeper happened to capture. It's not the whole record of what the market will bear. It doesn't tell us all of that. It just tells us one thing.
SPEAKER_00But you were saying like, but it's never sold at that price. Not one time in a year is what people were saying, like they need to price it at.
SPEAKER_01Well, maybe nobody's priced it there, right? Of course it's never been profitable if it's nobody if it's ever put a profitable price on it.
SPEAKER_00Well, you can't say that it's never happened, right? Because we didn't we didn't even have that data. Like we were talking about how one-dimensional um the data is that we're working from. Keep it doesn't capture every price. We experience sales all the time that never show up on a Keepa chart. That is true. Okay. And just because you don't have the evidence that it happened doesn't mean then it didn't happen. The old Oh, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01That's absolutely true.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
SPEAKER_00Oh, or and if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there, here it's gonna happen, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So fine. We maybe could never see it, but even if we could know for sure and it had never ever been at that price. Yes. Even if we could, still doesn't mean I wouldn't test it there.
SPEAKER_00I totally agree.
SPEAKER_01Just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean it couldn't happen. History doesn't block me from trying a different price. It's just a test. Okay. And I will guarantee you that if nobody prices it at $20, everything everybody prices it at $10, nobody's gonna pay $20 for it. They might have paid $20 if you priced it at $20, but they're not gonna give you $20 for your $10 offer.
SPEAKER_00This is just a test, right? You can't know whether anything's profitable until you actually complete a sale. But you're definitely not giving yourself a chance if you never test. Yeah. Which is why I like to say a lot lately that you're gonna cover the biggest part of the learning curve after you have inventory in the system. Sitting over here on the sidelines saying, yeah, nothing looks profitable for me. You know, your bar is way up here. You got to get on the field and get some experience before you start slamming systems that actually work.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And before anybody gets all panicky here, I'm not telling you that all of these are going to work.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01In fact, most of them are not going to work. Remember that Pareto principle we were talking about? Plan on it. A test is not to because you already know it's a work. Why would you need to test it if you knew it was going to work or not?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01All right. Yeah. We'll talk about more that we're going to do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is like this one looks like nothing on paper, right? And then I'll open Path Profit Zones, buy box spread, like you were talking about, pop open the list or the map, and there's a price sitting in Seattle right now that is green. And also maybe in Albuquerque, even though it could be red as heck over in New York and in San Francisco, right? Exactly. Again, make sure you got capital protection in here.
SPEAKER_01And velocity.
SPEAKER_00And velocity. Stack the deck in your favor. That's what we're trying to do with this whole system here, right? Because there are no guarantees. All we can do is put as many things as our favor in our favor as possible and then test.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And let me just say this clearly. Worth testing does not mean profitable.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01It means worth testing. Those are not the same thing.
SPEAKER_00I agree.
SPEAKER_01We will find out if it's profitable by testing.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01But worth testing does not equal profiting.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01Profitable, sorry.
SPEAKER_00Which is why we spend so much time focusing on the system.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00That is getting put you in a chance to be successful as opposed to the yeah, I mean there is no easy button here, people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There just isn't. If there were, we would be using it.
SPEAKER_00Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01But instead, we build a system that makes it easy.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And you can too. Yeah. Now go ahead. That said, I think the frustration point is legit. Like I can't fault people for being frustrated about it. But I think you're blaming the wrong thing here.
SPEAKER_01Okay, Brian.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01What if we looked at the matching tools like Arbasaurus as a metal detector?
SPEAKER_00Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_01We're out on the beach and we're checking the metal. We're click click seeing if there's any metal there. It doesn't tell you if there's treasure there. It tells you there's metal there.
SPEAKER_00That's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You have to dig down to see if there's metal or not.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It might be a treasure. It might be a bottle cap. And you know what? Most of the time it's going to be a bottle cap. But those guys aren't out there for bottle caps, but they know they're going to get a lot of bottle caps before they find the gold. I love this because then it's like you know, lost wedding ring or whatever they're looking for.
SPEAKER_00It's like, well, so someone, you know, is doing that on the beach, right? Combing the beach, and uh they find six things and they're all bottle caps, and they're like, this metal detector sucks. Right? It's not the metal detector.
SPEAKER_01It's not the metal detector.
SPEAKER_00Just because you have to dig every time to discover what the heck that is doesn't mean it's just that beep. Yeah. Doesn't mean that it's a bad metal detector. It actually means the metal detector is doing its job.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I love that analogy.
SPEAKER_01Great one. Yeah. It's not a only gold, only gold ring detector. Yeah. No, it's a metal detector. It never promised to find you a gold ring.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And you have to find a lot of bottle caps before you find the treasure. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I don't know what makes us think that we don't have to go through all this. If it were really that kind of a deal, there would be no opportunity for the little guys. Oh, I know. It would be corporatized.
SPEAKER_00I started to say this a minute ago, but it's a dumb word, but if you think that you're going to run this business by getting a machine to hand you leads that you're going to make money on, you are sorely mistaken. And that's not the way this business works, right? This is an actual business. You have to test things. You have to have an RD department. You have to have operations. You have to have plans for continuous improvement. You have to manage your business. You have to do all the things that a normal business does. There's no slot machine that wins every time in any business, especially in this business. That's right. So now that we have a tool that does the matching, we then we get annoyed because we still have to make a decision. In other words, like we have still have to dig the hole after the metal detector says there's something here. And then we even get more annoyed that we have to test after we dig it up, right? And now people want the answer before they ever test. Yeah. They want every single one to be a winner or they get upset about it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And this is frustrating because the word test, we're testing a theory. We're testing to see if it's there or not, a yes or a no. We don't expect it to be right every every time. If we expect it to be right every time, if we knew the answer before we tested, why are we testing?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. We wouldn't need to do any of that.
SPEAKER_01We've already established we cannot know for sure before we test. Yep. So we test. So why do we expect to know for sure before we if we're testing something that we already know, we'd just be confirming, yeah, I already knew that, and we'd be wasting our time.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01It wouldn't be a tool, we wouldn't need a tool for that.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. We would just buy things and sell them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. But that's not the way it is. All right. So, Brian, listen to me when I say if you're looking for a tool that makes the decision for you, you're looking for a tool to run your business. Yep, this is not the place for you. We don't have a tool for that that will run your business. That's right. That's not, we can't help you with that. There are people who advertise tools that run your business for you. And the same people using those tools. Tools are the ones asking these questions. Was it okay? Oh, yeah. I'm passionate about this and I and I want to let me just one more thing.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01I do not let other businesses or other sellers tell me what my price should be. I don't let a tool tell me what my price should be. I don't let a repricer tell me what my price should be. I let my price tell me what my price should be. I test it at my price. It works there or it doesn't. That's how I know. My own test, my own experience following my own test consistently, the same every single time. So I know for sure what that means. I know exactly what my book of business looks like. I know exactly what fits in it and what doesn't because I have a clear decision on every position I'm in. When to find more, when to do less, when to get out, when to pause, clear decisions made up front before I do anything. I don't make these decisions every time. I make them once and I stick with them. If you're expecting all of that to happen because you pushed a button, get over yourself. It is not gonna happen. It's there's just it's not gonna happen. You're gonna go broke.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I couldn't agree more. This is not a place for people who are looking for an easy button. I think I don't want to say that who wouldn't want an easy button. I think we all would like an easy button, but this business is not it. It's for people who want a real business. That's who we are. If that's not who you are, this isn't for you. And we mean that with love, obviously, and support. We have no qualms with that, right? There are places that will coddle that, and they're full of people who never go anywhere.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. We want to work with winners.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01So are you afraid of hard work? No. No. Do you have time for hard work? Probably if you're here. Did you think this was not going to be hard work? You're just kidding yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yep. Agreed.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00All right.
SPEAKER_01All right, we're gonna engage so hard to accept that a test might come back as a loss.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think people get crushed by that.
SPEAKER_01Well, if you can't accept that, if you can't accept one no, you're never gonna accept 60 that you might have to get to get 40 replants.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then we're making up those numbers a little bit, so don't say, you know, I tested 100 and I didn't get 40.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Like it takes experience, and you know, this is what we're shooting for. That doesn't happen for us all the time either.
SPEAKER_00Well, let's walk through these numbers. Like, if we you were mentioning this this morning, if we test 100 ASINs and 40 of them become replenishable, then what do you do? Replenish.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I have 40 replenishable aces.
SPEAKER_0040 replenishables, right? So go test 100 more. 40% pass again. And now you have 80 replenishables. Now do it a third time. Then you're gonna have 120 replenishables, right? And so now the question changes right once you've got 120 replenishables, which ones are actually carrying my business? And that's how you raise the bar in your business, right? Text the test the next 100 at that, like where your top 20% stops, like that or higher, right?
SPEAKER_01Then you start bringing the floor up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That means you have to do more than just test it higher. You're looking for a different breed of ace and when you're doing that. But you also have more experience, you know what you're looking for.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. This is planned growth.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01This is funded growth. It's not as much as I can, you know? As much as I can is not a plan. I'll say that till the day I die. When you look at it as as much as I can, then every no feels like a failure. If I planned on 40% to fat pass, if I if 50% pass, I feel good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But 50% didn't pass, uh huh, I still feel good. I've got a better conversion rate than I was expecting, and now I'm on to something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01As I get better, this is what happens. Oh, oh, I need to increase my conversion rate, not increase my guesses.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Well, so let's say that it's 40%.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So that means you have 60 that don't pass. So am I losing money on these?
SPEAKER_01Let's think about that.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01If you use the three-step check for all 100, then that means you use the three-step check for those 60 that are not going to be replenishable. That's all that test answered for is replenish or not. But you know what? Every single one of the hundred, including those 60 that did not uh become replenishable, they gave me a sale. Oh, yeah. And what does a sale give me? It gives me experience. It gives me lots of experience. It gives me a step towards trust that Amazon needs to give me more choices, right? They're gonna open more up for me. It gives me a chance to get customer feedback. Yeah. It gets me one more sale of those 200 sales in six months that I need to make to increase my account health rate. It gives me a whole lot. Just it's almost like the byproducts are worth more than the actual thing we were going for. How many businesses have you seen that?
SPEAKER_00J just as much.
SPEAKER_01They make just as much money off the byproducts as they do off of the main thing that they're selling. So what those 60 bought you is 60 sales. And it's more, 60 more sales than you would have had if you hadn't tested 100.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think you didn't you let you buried the lead on that one, right? The three-step check. What is step two of the three-step check? Capital protection, right?
SPEAKER_01So I didn't lose money on it.
SPEAKER_00Theoretically, you didn't lose money on it, right? You had capital protection. We know that. There are no guarantees on any single item, right? Nobody can promise you a floor on one ASIN just like they can't promise you a minimum on an ASIN. But like I said before, what we can do is stack the deck in our favor and across a hundred ACNs, run through the through the check on those hundred, and you shouldn't be underwater. Because if you did lose a little bit on any of them, you did make money on the 20.
SPEAKER_01The volume is going to help save you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So there is real value in tested ACNs that never became replenishable.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01These ACINs that did not pass for replenishable still give you everything else. Once you can see that value, once you can see the value of the byproduct, the replenishable ASINs will take care of themselves.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Don't go after that sale. That protected sale.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Don't just our main process here is the testing process. Yeah. So I think you were talking about some businesses that have a byproduct that actually turned out to be highly valued.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00In the early days of the oil business, the actual product was kerosene, it was used for a lamp oil. I don't know the story. Yeah. Okay. That's what they were selling was the lamp oil. Gasoline was this low-value byproduct that that no one had it used for. They used to burn it or dump it in the river or whatever. And then what happened? Automobiles showed up. And that gasoline fueled there. Um, the whole industry. And today, like gasoline is the thing.
SPEAKER_01Way more profitable than kerosene.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Nobody uses kerosene.
SPEAKER_01In abundant. Because kerosene's much dirtier. And gasoline can be cleaned much better.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, and that's that's the whole thing. Again, your replenishables are the byproduct.
SPEAKER_00I think that's the flipping of the script. So instead of the the uh the items that don't convert being the byproduct, your replenishables are the byproduct because your main your main thing here is testing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Just like now, it's not gasoline. It's not kerosene that's the main thing is gasoline. The main thing then kerosene is you know the secondary.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01So builders who run the test get the replenishables anyway.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01Run the test. The decision making is in the test. The decision about the end of the test has already been made before you make the test. If it passes, replenish. If it doesn't, don't replenish. That's a different decision than whether you test or not. And it's it's already made by the time you get there.
SPEAKER_00Systematic. Automatic.
SPEAKER_01And repeatable.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and yeah, and repeatable. All right. Well, tell us how you really feel, Robin.
SPEAKER_01So I'm a little animated today, aren't I?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Oh, it's all good.
SPEAKER_01Do you have a quote for us today, Bryce?
SPEAKER_00I do. I'll wrap it up with a quote here. This one comes to him to us from George Box, who is a famous statistician.
SPEAKER_01There are famous statisticians.
SPEAKER_00I know, right? Obviously, like I've heard of the city.
SPEAKER_01Famous in what circles?
SPEAKER_00I got George's autograph.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, like you've ever heard his name. What did he say? That's what I want to know.
SPEAKER_00All models are wrong, but some are useful.
SPEAKER_01If you look at the buy box as a model or sales rank as a model, profit history is a model.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Every one of them is a simplification of something bigger and messier and more information. It's useful, but it's not the truth.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01The moment you treat one of those simplified data points as the verdict, the truth, the final word, instead of as input, you'll throw away good acence with the total confidence. Throw away the bath the baby with the bathwater.
SPEAKER_00And to that end, I don't think the three-step check is a verdict either. It's just input like the rest of these things, right? It's a model.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't tell us everything. We knew it wasn't going to tell us everything. It just gives us stacks of deck in our favor.
SPEAKER_00And it creates consistency in our approach. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So all right. Well, so when you're staring at a list of ACENs that look like nothing on paper, you know what cures that? Test more ACNs.
SPEAKER_01Test more ACE. Let's go test more ACE. Let's go test more ACENS. Talk to you soon, everybody.