How SellerSEO CEO Andy Arnott grew SellerSEO to $68K revenue and 32 customers in 2024.

just got done editing this interview you guys are gonna love it before i do that though i want you to know that i'm going to be in the comments for the next 30 minutes or so answering your questions if there's additional questions you want me to ask the ceo next time i interview them leave them below or if you're just loving the data points i get ceos to share click the thumbs up button below that's your way of telling me you're loving this stuff and i'll get you more of it additionally again i'll be in the comments answering any questions you have all right for 30 minutes enjoy the interview hello everyone my guest today is andy arnott he's been an entrepreneur since the age of 19 started and run multiple seven figure businesses now running seller seo his current venture is a suite of sas tools dedicated to helping amazon sellers scale their businesses with seo and paid marketing andy you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely hells yeah all right this whole amazon spaceman is just hot hot hot huh it's also brutal it's very competitive who do you compete with the most um let's see some of the biggest players in the market are a company called viral launch another company called helium 10. um there's quite a few actually it feels like there's a new one popping up like every week and what do they all do right so what space do you put yourself in um so we are a little bit different in terms of uh what we're doing um most of the tools are you know doing like things like uh you know keywords and um you know listing optimization and things like that we also have those types of tools i would say actually the sourcing tools so getting uh you know this data uh algorithm uh data driven by algorithms to uh show amazon sellers like what's gonna be the next good product you know um but we've seen a huge uh problem with that because the data skewed it's all based on algorithm and so it's guessing because amazon doesn't release that data right yeah they're getting better at releasing that data but um we took a different turn and we're trying to concentrate more on things like off-site traffic because in the last couple of months there's been a huge shift on amazon they're driving less organic more paid and so the cost per click on the amazon ppc uh platform is astronomical so give me an example of a brand that uses you name their product and tell me how they use you um okay um prometheus wellness um they use us for um listing optimization uh which is our listing lightning tool so it's kind of like hold your hand seo like you put in your main phrase and it'll tell you put this in your title put these in your bullet points put this in your description on amazon the amazon description exactly so it's like it's it's like i don't know if you you've done any seo on like wordpress but there's like uh yoast i think is the name of the plugin where it kind of like guides you it's similar to that um so it's it's holding your hand even if you know nothing about seo to get you an seo optimized listing um and then they also use um our we have a traffic titan tool which is spinning up uh campaigns for google ppc but um integrating something called two-step url which um embeds a keyword um in those ads so when you drop on amazon you get some organic rank for those keywords okay so they've got prometheus wellness has a product called the collagen pro of peptides essentially right their their title is like very long and it almost feels like keyword stuffing non-gmo paleo friendly pasture-raised grass-fed these are things that i assume your system is going these are hot things figure out to put them in your title is that kind of what you do yeah exactly so um you know the amazon a9 algorithm is similar to google was like five years ago so they're kind of behind the curve so keyword stuffing is you know even though they tell you you know best practice not to do it uh we've seen over and over again that the companies that are doing that are are the ones who are doing well i always like to use stanley tools i like to pick on them but if you pull up a stanley tools listing you know they're like uh you know four in one screwdriver right and that's it that's all they have in their title and it's it's like on the opposite spectrum of optimized you know so um i mean that's how some of the little guys are competing with these big companies is they just don't quite get it yet um so it's cool to enable these mom and pop businesses to um you know get some traction on amazon how do you know what words are getting the most searches by consumers and amazon search so there's a couple of different uh data points now so they just uh released something called brand analytics that ranks keywords from top to bottom um that's one way um it's not it's part of the the seller suite so we're sellers as well we still sell seven figures every year on amazon that's kind of how we got into the space okay um but uh so we use that and we also use a bunch of other data sources and kind of combine them together to figure out what's gonna work best interesting okay when when'd you launch the company what year uh last year uh we kind of did a real soft like beta i think it was like in april just to kind of get our feet wet see what worked what didn't uh we had a full launch at the end of summer so we're just over a little over a year now okay and what are i mean is this a pure sas model or you take a percent of sales or what uh no it's pure sass at least at the moment we we might be changing that with ppc and things because we're actually underpriced uh for a lot of our competitors so what is promethean and the average customer what are they paying you per year to use the tech um so if they go yearly it's i believe we're at about 870 dollars for our top plan um and then monthly it's 97 bucks 97 a month is a fair average you'd say um our our average is probably like 75 because we have some lesser plans too which we're actually going to phase out because um the tools work together so a lot of people when they sign up for the lesser plans like oh i want to you know get to this end point but then they don't have access to the tools so there's some frustration there so i think we're going to go to a single plan interesting okay so 75 uh launched in 2018 uh take me through i mean how did you get your first customer do you remember um so we were doing um you know traditional advertising um i also started building my social um last year we launched the podcasts uh right around that same time it's a podcast title uh it's called amazon fba seller roundtable and uh we've only been around for i think we're close to a year now maybe a little over but uh yeah we've just been climbing the charts destroying it um i think because numbers andy how many how many downloads oh you know i don't track downloads um go to charitable and you'll you'll see i mean we're we're solid um we're beating a lot of the um a lot of the other uh major podcasts in the space so stuff that's been around for a long long time but what do you why so i mean look the the way i think about podcasts it's almost like a daily what if you're it's a daily show it's almost like a daily webinar essentially right if you get subscriptions but why don't you track why don't you care about downloads isn't that enough isn't that a good barometer i mean i mean we will probably soon um it's just we're not we don't take advertisers anything right now so for us that's not really a metric that i want to well but ignore that they're all potential buyers of your software all the listeners right no for sure they are yeah yeah yeah okay well i mean that's fine that's fine well i mean is it a daily show uh it's it's weekly and then we will throw in like something called a quick tip episode which is usually like 5-10 minutes if something big comes out like in the amazon space that people need to know about like just recently amazon rolled out um a feedback a feedback button which sounds pretty basic but on an amazon order now on the seller screen you can hit a button that says request feedback um so that's that was kind of a big deal so i just did a quick episode on that and then we also do um because we record live every tuesday at 1 pm uh pacific time a lot of times um people can't make it like our guests can't make it so then we kind of do an extra we call it which it's just a one-on-one like we're doing now yeah okay so how many customers have you scaled to over the past year so it's an interesting story so we got to about 9 000 uh dollars uh mmr um and then we we had a uh programming uh issue where the cancel button wasn't working on our on our software and with stripe they have a one percent um chargeback rate and then they boot you and so we ended up getting booted from stripes so we ended up having to start over pretty much which was really really frustrating um you know when you port over it's it's really hard to get people to port over um when you're you know spooling up a new um billing system uh so that was a that was a real um issue and a really about 120 customers paying 75 bucks a month for nine grand a month...