Finding Successful Products to Sell Online, with Ecomhunt Founder

David: Your first big dropshipping store was selling photography gear and this was back in 2017, and the store really blew up and it generated more than one million in sales, and this is kind of the dream for lots of people, to find products to sell or to find a niche and then just scale and scale and scale. What was it like for you to go from a few years prior, never having even heard of dropshipping to then having this store that, all of a sudden, was up over seven figures? 

Mordechai: Well, what most people wanna know is that I’m now driving a huge car, expensive, bought an amazing house, but in reality it’s all BS. The reality is that when you run this volume, when you have this huge store, it’s really hard.

David: So you didn’t take a helicopter here today?

Mordechai: No, no, no. I took my private jet. But seriously, it’s really hard because every step on the scaling process is like a new… It’s a different business. It’s a whole new world, you know? So if you’re selling for 5k a month and then you sell for 10k a month, it’s totally different. It’s like a new business. You need to talk to suppliers. You need to have everything in place, everything organized, logistics, marketing, budget. Cash flow is like the biggest thing, and no one thinks about cash flow, but you’re spending a lot of money before making any money, and many people, many dropshippers say like, “Yeah, you can simply spend what you just earned to keep scaling,” but it’s not true because you have fees.

 So if you’re scaling too fast and you don’t have this big cash flow behind you, you will get stuck. And that’s like hell for dropshippers because that means you need to stop the ads, you need to pay everyone before getting anything, and, you know, it’s cool. You’re making sales. I remember that day when we started to do over 10k a day in sales. It was like amazing. The Shopify notification was like the ka-ching, the ka-ching thing. Yeah, I recall… I remember myself shutting it off. It was so annoying because it was like every second.

David: Like great call.

Mordechai: And there are some good experiences, and it sounds like really, really good, but something that I think would be really important for your new users is that dropshipping is a business like any other business. So you always need to be on the numbers, and if you don’t, you miscalculate. The smallest part in this business, you will lose your margins, and I know for a fact, because if I recall, I had this $200,000 store and everything left from this store was like nothing. Everything was spent. We were going from winner to winner to winner to winner, and this is like what most dropshippers do. They look for a winner, they wanna scale it and they wanna collect the profits and they don’t really think about it as a real business. And I think this is the core problem of dropshipping. Everyone is like, “Yeah, I’m going to make a lot of money. I’m going to be rich in one month.”

David: It doesn’t work like that? 

Mordechai: No, it doesn’t work like that.

David: Yeah, you mentioned before that…

Mordechai: It takes two months. No, I’m just kidding.

David: You said before we hopped on that you had a few stores that didn’t, that weren’t home runs.

Mordechai: Yeah.

David: What was…

Mordechai: Few would be like really nice.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: Few is very nice. I had a lot of stores that didn’t work. I actually have today many stores that didn’t work, like almost every two weeks, I launched a new store, trying a new niche, new products to sell, and this is the spirit. You need to always be on top of your emotions. You fail and you come back again. You try again. This is this business, you know? So we started with general stores and this is what I also suggest to anyone out there: Don’t start with niche products to sell because you need to learn so much. The learning curve is huge.

David: Just to define those real quick. So a niche store is a store that sells products that are all very much tied together, that are all very specific around a particular theme and they tend to go after a very specific target audience. And then a general store, on the other hand, is a store that has a wide variety of products to sell that might appeal to an equally wide variety of people. So I guess a question that might come from that is if you’ve seen, in your experience working from dropshippers, if you’ve seen certain characteristics or traits that might indicate that somebody would be better suited for one or the other when it comes to niche store versus general store.

Mordechai: That’s a good question because both of them are good concepts. I cannot say like this works better than that, but it also depends on your skills. So if you’re already a really experienced marketer, how a store should look like and you have a lot of experience in, basically in marketing, I would say go niche directly. You don’t need to waste your time on general stores. But most people don’t have this experience. They need to learn Facebook ads, they need to learn about email marketing, retargeting, remarketing, retargeting on website, negative ads, YouTube ads, Google… There’s so much stuff you need to learn. So I would say go general, test many products, and do Facebook ads, focus on that until you feel comfortable with the platforms, until you feel like you know your stuff. And at some point, you will find a winner that you will want to probably pivot to a niche store.

David: So I wanted to ask you about saturated products, and this is on your Ecomhunt. There’s actually a metric for how saturated a certain product might be, and there’s kind of a common sense calculation that you don’t want to sell a product that’s already really saturated, but you also don’t wanna sell a product that nobody’s interested in so there should be some happy medium here between too much and too little. How should people approach this both in terms of Ecomhunt’s own metrics and then also just generally when is something too saturated versus not popular enough? 

Mordechai: Between us? 

David: And everyone listening.

Mordechai: And everyone listening. So it’s a secret that will be revealed. I don’t really believe in this concept. People are saying saturated products. I actually believe that the product doesn’t matter. What matters is how you market it, how you price it, and how you build the story around this product. You can take almost any product out there and scale it and make sales with it. And even if you don’t scale it, you can still make sales. So if someone out there thinks that products are getting saturated, it’s wrong. We have this… Actually, we had this dude. He tested the product on Ecomhunt from two years ago and he scaled for over $1 million in sales with a saturated product. So you can see that there is some kind of rotation on the social networks like people are changing all the time. So even if you take old products to sell, you can still, you can refresh and resell it.

David: So fidget spinners could still be a thing, huh? 

Mordechai: Yeah, I’m not sure about that. I think this is…

David: That’s a good example.

Mordechai: When I see a saturated product, I’m a bit excited because it’s already proven to work. I don’t need to come up with the right strategy and test hundreds of different creatives to know what works. I just need to take what’s already working, refresh it, make it feel new, and resell it, and that’s it.

David: What does that process look like? I mean you mentioned that you can’t do it with everything. Maybe there are some things that are really truly saturated.

Mordechai: Yes. Spinner. Yeah.

David: Spinner. But what would… How would you identify one of these opportunities where something, in some people’s eyes, is saturated, but for other people, they’re brand new products to sell.

Mordechai: Well, I think that this type of products are the products that solve a problem. I think the problem always exists. Even if someone solved this product, this problem like a few years ago, it’s still a problem, you know? People are growing, people are joining Facebook every day. Every month, like it’s new active users. It’s not always the same people. So I think that even if you solve the problem and you solve it like for a long time, I think there is room. There will always be people with the same problem that no one reached to them and said like, “Hey, we have a solution.” Different languages, different countries, like the world is huge. Even if you scale to seven figures like weekly, you can still tap into this market. And a great example for this type of product is the black mask. Do you remember this black mask, this cream that you put on your face? 

David: Like it opens up your pores or something like that? 

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. So this was like the spinner, the fidget spinner, like back in 2017, I think, and everyone said like, “This product is saturated.” Everyone started to sell it really intensively, like the huge spinner of beauty and creams and stuff. And in 2018, one year later, I told a friend of mine like, “I’m going to sell the black mask.” And he’s like, “Man, this market is already… “

David: It’s done.

Mordechai: It’s done. The reviews are nasty. People crushed this product. And I’m like, “I’m going to prove to everybody that we can still sell this product.” So I uploaded a new ad, a new copy, rebranded the page, new… Everything was fresh, brand new, and I targeted Canada. And the reason I went for this country is because I figured that on AliExpress, it’s too expensive to ship this black mask. So most sellers didn’t even bother to target Canada. So this is what I did and we started to get sales like every day, like five sales, five sales, six sales. I couldn’t scale it. It was like non-scalable products to sell, but I still made money.

David: So people shouldn’t be too scared off by saturation. Got it.

Mordechai: Yeah. Yeah.

David: What are some other things that you think people should keep in mind as they’re evaluating the legitimacy of products to sell in their own store? 

Mordechai: First of all, buy that product, all of one of this, like I always do, every time I wanna sell a product online. So go to Amazon, go to YouTube, go to Google, go to blogs that talk about these products, and try to see if it’s a really good product, if it’s actually working before trying to sell it, because eventually you will get chargebacks, refunds, and a bad reputation, and you will end up closing your store. You don’t want that. And if you see that everything is okay, all do, one of them to your place, like check it out, use it, try to see if it’s a good product. 

So for example, we had this product that we wanted to sell. It was a case for iPhones, and on the back of the case you could write stuff like a lead. I don’t know. I don’t even know how the technology works, but it was really cool. You could write down like groceries, tasks, numbers. So when I saw this product, I was like, “Yeah, all people will love this product. It’s really cool.” And we ordered one and we did the test like for two months. So most people will never do that, but I really wanna know how long will the text appear on the back of my phone? Will it be erased after two days or is it there for infinity? So we wrote something, I left it on my desk, and for two months, it was still on the screen. So I was like, “Okay, this product… “

David: This is a good one.

Mordechai: This is a good one. This is a good example, I think, for anyone that’d want to have products to sell online. Order a unit. It’s not expensive. Test it. It will take like two weeks to arrive. Yeah, if you’re positive about the quality and you know that you can stand behind your product, it will also give you… You will be more confident about your store and about what you answer to your customers.

David: Is this step of ordering a sample product… I mean you talk to dropshippers all the time. Is this something that you see not everybody doing? I mean is this kind of a foreign concept for some people to actually go ahead and order the product? 

Mordechai: I think that most sellers don’t do it. They don’t even bother to check the product. They simply want the money. They wanna sell online. They wanna make money. And this is… Actually, this is something that I personally dislike because someone is giving out their money to buy from you. They trust your store. They decided that they wanted to do business with you, and you’re shipping them a really poor product, and it’s bad karma. I think it’s simply bad karma.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: Yeah.

David: On like a spiritual level.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David: Not just, not just chargebacks.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. I think on a spiritual level, it will… Eventually, there will be a chargeback in some way. I don’t know.

David: A chargeback on your soul.

Mordechai: Yeah, something like that. I think you should definitely check products if you’re going to sell online.

David: I wanted to ask you about AliExpress dropshipping. This is a platform that people use to source dropshipping products, and it’s unbelievable how much stuff is on AliExpress. You can find 200 different versions of the exact same thing. You’ve spent as much time studying products as anybody, and AliExpress has this product Mecca. You know it’s where a lot of dropshippers turn. And what are some of the things that you look for in the AliExpress infrastructure that might signal which are good products to sell? So by that, I mean the orders or the reviews. If you see a product that looks cool, alright, great start. But then what’s the next step to determine the next step to determine how viable that is? 

Mordechai: It’s easy to find good products to sell. You can say like if you said, “Wow,” when you saw it, or, “What is this?” When you have like an emotional reaction when you see the product, I think that this is the first sign of good products to sell. The second step would be like is it actually working? It could be weird or wow or what is this? But that’s it. It stopped there. And if you don’t have the next step which is like, “Is it working?” like, “Is this real?” If you don’t have that step, this product is not a winner. 

So you need to have these two steps. Then what I usually do is put it like in this Excel sheet, and then I start to calculate, like if I have like a conversion for $10, how much money would I make? I add inside like the fees. I add inside the cost of the fulfillment, the cost of the shipping, and then I build up this huge file where I can type in like 1,000 orders. How much money do I make? 500? 100? You know? And based on those numbers, I can kind of know it’s not real because eventually Facebook decides how much you will be paying for the conversions, but you can still get an image of what you’re going to spend. So you can, for example, say that I need to spend like $1,000 to make $20,000. Is it worth it or not? I don’t know. It depends on the product. So many products to sell that I wanted to test, when I placed it in this sheet and I calculated everything, I was like, “Yo, I need to sell like 10,000 units to make 5K. It doesn’t make any sense.” 

So, move on, next, unless you change your strategy, you know this free plus shipping stuff and all that, but if you wanna keep it simple, retail price, discount, traffic from Facebook and keep it simple, you should definitely make this kind of calculations because if you’re selling a product that eventually will make you losing money, you don’t wanna sell it from the beginning.

David: Right.

Mordechai: You wanna be prepared for that. It should be like a part from your plan. If your plan is to break even and then upsell, so you should know about it. Yeah, so that’s pretty much it, the next step. As soon as you find good products to sell, make your numbers, you know? 

David: Mm-hmm. You mentioned Facebook a couple of times.

Mordechai: Yes.

David: It’s something that you used back in your early days of dropshipping years ago and are still using today and I’m curious in what ways Facebook has evolved over that time and how you’ve had to adapt as well to the platform? 

Mordechai: Well, when we started like 2014, I think, everyone was doing post-engagements ads, like really simple posts, image, not even a video, nothing special, and it worked, you know? But today, it’s not working anymore because Facebook is optimizing their system like every day. And today, when you run a post-engagement, you will actually get engagement. You will not get any sales. You can get a few sales, but this is not the main objective of your campaign.

David: So you could have post-engagement or conversion or traffic.

Mordechai: Yeah.

David: You’re talking about the different objectives.

Mordechai: Yeah.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: Different objectives. So when we started the objectives, you can say that they didn’t work. Whatever you do, like it’s the same thing. You’re getting sales.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: Today, it’s different because each objective is actually working. If you do a post-engagement, you will get engagement. If you do traffic, you will get… Everything is slowly getting better, optimized. So if I were starting today and we do it like almost every week, we start brand new with a brand new Pixel. Facebook has this Pixel thing.

David: Yeah.

Mordechai: So, brand new, ad account, everything is new and directly website conversion optimized for purchase even if I don’t have any purchases, because what Facebook does is that they’re looking for the people that are buying online when you optimize for purchase. But if you optimize for engagement, they will look for people that comment, like, share. It’s good for turning your post viral and then use it as a conversion, but it’s wasting more money. You will be spending more money to build this viral thing.

David: Do you anticipate that Facebook will be the primary advertising platform for dropshippers for some time to come or is there something else on the horizon that you’re really excited about in terms of making noise about products? 

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. Actually there is this influencer stuff. Like everyone is doing influencers on social media and stuff. And I think that it’s a good way to boost your store when it’s getting started. You can contact these influencers that have a lot of followers, and you can pay them really cheap. It’s like $500, sometimes maybe $100. Sometimes you don’t even need to pay them. You can simply send them a free product they are excited about it, and if your product is good, they will do a good review about it on their Instagram page, and this kind of stuff can bring you many sales to charge your Pixel before you even start on Facebook and then you can start by retargeting them instead of starting with new cold ads.

Instead of going directly to new people that never heard about your product or your brand, you can start by re-targeting people that already engaged with your product through this influencer. So, I think that influencers is definitely something that now is big on the online dropshipping business. Something that many people talked about but never really experienced with is dropshipping using Snapchat.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: I heard many people doing that. Pinterest is starting to be like a new platform for dropshippers and… Yeah, basically what I see is that dropshippers are getting smarter, and they start to understand that Facebook is only a channel to advertise. It’s simply, it’s a channel to reach people that may be interested in your product. When I got started in this business, like Facebook was like this big thing. You upload an ad and you make sales, that’s it. You don’t need any other channels, you don’t need Google, you don’t need anything. And now people are starting to get more smart about it. They do Google ads, they do Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat. They try really everything. And I think that this is a good thing, because they start to treat their dropshipping store as a real business.

David: You mentioned spending 500 or 1,000 bucks on an influencer campaign or an influencer post. I wanted to ask, how much money should people be prepared to spend upfront? You talked about starting numerous stores over and over, and I know there have been a lot of headaches and failures along the way. What’s a reasonable amount of money to anticipate putting into a store to get things off the ground? 

Mordechai: When I think about this question, I think that if you’re interested in starting your own dropshipping store, business, whatever, have a business plan, be prepared. If you’re willing to spend 5K, what will you be spending this 5K for? Like 1,000 on products to sell, 4,000 for ads? What will you be you doing with this money? Many of the people, most of them, I think like over 90% of people simply throw money on ads. They create a store, they find products to sell and start spending, wasting money, money, money, money out, just wasting money on ads, testing and testing and testing and testing. Eventually, they spend like 5K and they’re like, “Woah, what happened? How did I get to this point? Now I need to go back to my daily job. Now I need to… What will I eat?” They don’t think about this kind of stuff. I got a message from a person once, he said like he sold his car to pay for ads and stuff. I was like, “Why did you do that? Do you have any kind of plan? Is this part of your strategy? Why did you do that?” He’s like, “No, I just needed money for ads to test new products to sell.”

So, if you’re getting started, I think that there is no amount of money. There is a minimum. You will be spending money, so you need a minimum. I think $1,000 would be the minimum amount to get started in building a real business. You can test products with $100 as well. Shopify is free for 40 days, and Facebook Ad is like, you can spend $10 a day to test. So, it’s not really an expensive business, but I think you should consider at least 1K, like $1,000 just to get started.

David: It’s not expensive, but it’s not free.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah, it’s not free. I think that when you start, when you’re brand new to this business, $1,000 would be like your fee to learn. This is your learning money.

David: What is that 1,000 bucks gonna buy you? 

Mordechai: Information.

David: Okay.

Mordechai: So if you’re going for a product, for a specific product, and you tested it and you got good results, sales, breaking even, losing a bit of money, I think you should keep doing the same niche, because you’re learning more and more and more about this audience. And at some point, you can say like, “Okay, I’m stopping now. Let’s see what happens. What is happening? Okay, so I know that the customers are buying 25 to 44 age, most of them are men from Texas or, I don’t know. This product is good for them and I think that I can bring more value to this audience, to this niche.” And now you can start focusing on that. Now, if you wanna keep the general store, it’s fine as well. You will bid information about people that buy gadgets. But even if you do a general store, make sure you’re under some kind of a niche. So if you’re doing accessories for a phone, stay in the accessories field, gadgets, drones, I don’t know, but in the same field, because people that love accessories for mobile will probably like drones as well.

It’s the same thing. The more money you waste on Facebook, the more data you get. So you learn more about this audience. And I think that if you’re going to spend money online, spend it to buy information. This is like the biggest thing you need to know. It’s not like… You’re not buying sales, you’re buying information.

David: One thing I know that EcomHunt specializes in is price recommendations. And I think pricing products is a headache for a lot of dropshippers ’cause you have to account for the marketing and you have to account for the shipping, and then if there are discounts going on. There are just a lot of moving parts. What are your pricing recommendations based on and what are, kind of, some rules of thumb that you think people should remember with the pricing? 

Mordechai: Yeah. I think the pricing should be always like at least 2X. So if the product is $10, 2X at least. Then if you’re getting started, and this is most of the people, you should price it a bit lower. Like when people ask me about pricing, they’re like, “Why do you sell this cheap? You will lose money.” And I say, “I know, it’s part of the plan.” They say, “What plan?”

Like I created an entire plan. I’m going to waste $500 for example, I’m going to bring in sales. I’m going to see sales. When you get sales, you get excited, you get motivated because people are buying. You’re like, “Man, I’m selling. Yeah, I’m losing money, but I’m selling.” So if you’re getting started, lower the price. Don’t be scared to lose money. You’re not losing money, you’re buying customers, you’re buying information. Then you can use that information to buy more customers that will be profitable, or you can sell these customers even more. 

We actually called customers. Like when we started with the photography store, some of our customers bought one, twice, a third time, and then we started calling them like, “Hey, what’s up? John? Yeah, it’s Mike from the store.” He’s like, “Yeah, cool.” I said, “Do you remember us?” He’s like, “Yeah, I remember. Your products are great.” So, he’s really excited about hearing someone from the company he just purchased that is actually calling them, they’re really happy about it. Say like, “You know, we have this new promotion this week and we’re going to sell 50% discount on our entire collection of tripods. Is this something that you may be interested in?” And, “Yeah, this is amazing. Can you call me later on?” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.” 

So we’re starting to create this relationship with our customers where we actually call them and we’re making really good sales by calling them, not even using Facebook marketing. And the way we got to these customers is by selling at a loss. We sold product that we’re losing money on the marketing, but we have a customer that is happy with our company, that he paid like a cheap price, a good quality product, and now we can call him with more products to sell, and this is where you make the money, on the backend. It’s not like the frontend. The front is only in the software industry, we call it like acquisition.

You have the part of the acquisition, how much are you willing to pay for a customer, and then you have the retention. And this is the lifetime value, how much money can you make your customer spend on your brand? And this is where the big money is, it’s not the frontend. And this is really also something that really confuses many dropshippers that they think that the product that they are now testing and selling, this is what will bring them success. The truth is not. A few of them, yes. A few people that have this luck, they land on this really, really viral product and make a lot of money with these viral products to sell. They make seven figures, and then they start like teaching other people about it. But it’s not something that you can teach. It’s a chance, it’s luck. It’s not really… It’s not science. The science behind whatever business you do is the retention part in any type of business, dropshipping, softwares, offline businesses, everything. The business starts when the customers buy from you. Again, this is where your business starts. This is where dropshipping, I think, gets real, gets serious.

David: So I assume that you’re not still calling your customers. What would be the retention…

Mordechai: I do call them sometimes.

David: You still… Okay, okay.

Mordechai: Yeah, I do call them.

David: I stand corrected. But what would be the customer retention methods, or strategies that you would encourage people to try to…

Mordechai: Well, I don’t think that there is this metric that you should be following, you should be like watching every day, like this is the metric that I need. The most important about these metrics is about how much money you’re spending. So if you acquire a customer for, let’s say $10, and you’re losing $5 on him, you need to make this $5 back, and more. So $5 is your minus. You need to break even and then you need to make your profit. I like to do this within the first two months, because if you wait too long, they will forget about you. So I think that the first two months is really important. 

Email marketing. Send them emails. If you are not comfortable with calling, email is good as well. You know that they received the package, send them a personal email, make it look personal. “Hey John, we just heard that you got the product. Would you mind to vote from one to 10, or one to five, how did you like our product?” I think there is an app that does that. I think…

David: Yeah, there are a lot of feedback apps.

Mordechai: Loox is one, a really famous one, I think. They do that. And it’s really cool, and you get honest reviews from customers, what they think about the product and everything. So you can be easily upselling them more products because you know what they think, know what they want now. And this is… For me, this is where it starts. You have the testing part, and then you have the real thing, talking to your customers, checking out, “Are you happy with my brand? Can I continue selling to other people?” This is like you’re… How do you call it? Your stamp. This is your stamp.

David: Sure.

Mordechai: This is a stamp that says like, “My customers love me.” And it motivates you. You get excited about it, it motivates you and you get this strong will of continuous… You wanna continue selling to other people, you would be contacting magazines, blogs, websites, YouTubers, you will start contacting anybody out there because you know that your product is good, then you can sell it to more people. So I think that this is something really, really important if you’re dropshipping.

David: Alright, so you have awesome products to sell that you’ve ordered and that you’ve tested that you’re proud of, and then you find prices that you think are reasonable and they fit the business plan you have. And then another big element to the equation is targeting. And you can have beautiful Facebook ads and pixel and everything set up just right, but if you’re not targeting correctly, then there are gonna be issues. What have you learned about targeting and what would you suggest people keep in mind as they target this beautiful ad that they created? 

Mordechai: I think that when it comes to targeting, it’s always the same. For a few years now, it’s been always the same. It will always be the same. You need to be creative with your targeting. And when I say creative, you need to build this prototype of the right customer. You need to build like, “Who is this customer? Why would he buy from you? What problem do you solve? Why is this cool for these type of people?” So you really wanna build a fake virtual person…

David: Persona, right? 

Mordechai: Yeah, you wanna build that. And as soon as you have this image in your head and this is the type of people that I think would be interested in this product, this is when you open Facebook and start doing targeting. This is like step one. Now… You know what, this is step two actually. Step one would be the research. So when we started… I do this all the time. When I test products to sell, I always search online. I check for blogs, magazines, stores, competition stores, brands, I check Facebook pages. I go scroll in the comments, like I open an advertisement on some page that is related to that specific niche, and I start to read the comments. And then I open profiles of those people just to see like, who are these people? And you can learn a lot from them. You can see like if most of them are women or men… So, if most of them are women, it’s probably a woman targeting. Then you can see from the pictures, are they younger, all the women, like 45, 60, what is the range, the age range? 

And there is something cool about Facebook that some people forget to disable which pages they like. So if you go inside a profile of someone that commented on this specific niche of whatever product you wanna test, you can see like which pages they like. So if you open a few profiles, let’s say you sample maybe 10 profiles that are relative that are all connected to the niche that you wanna sell, and then you open the likes page for each one of them and start scrolling down, and then you’ll find those pages that no one knows about them, that you can actually target on Facebook. So if you find like… You make a list like, how many common Facebook pages, which is interest in the… How many interests did you find? How many common interests do you find within this audience? This is probably the right interest to target.

David: Right.

Mordechai: And it would be low. The target would be low, but it will be super sniper targeting. It would be like really, really focused. So we would have like 100,000 audience size, maybe 200,000, but it’s enough, it’s enough to get started. This is my way of targeting. I do like sometimes to do like really broad stuff, like if I have a mobile case, I have no clue who will buy this product. I would start really broad, so iPhone owners age 18 to 25 maybe or 25 to 44, and that’s it. I can go really wild and really broad, but this kind of ad sets are really expensive. You need to spend like at least $50 a day just to understand what’s happening with these ad sets. So if you’re a beginner, I don’t suggest this method, but go for the first one.

David: You had a funny story about how you had a product, a mosquito killer product, and then you… Common sense said, “Hey, let’s target hot places with mosquitoes,” and this… That’s probably where I would have started as well, it makes total sense, but that didn’t work out. Tell me that kind of a… The second level of targeting that you did there.

Mordechai: Yeah, so the first part was like hot places like you’ve said. Actually, it’s not even my idea, it’s like we did… We’re consulting our users, like sometimes they ask questions about targeting and store reviews and stuff. So one of them asked about this product, this mosquito product, and he asked one of our mentors about this product. So my mentor asked like, “What would you do? What is the targeting for mosquitoes?” And the first thing that came to my head like, I don’t know, I have a kid, a really small one, he’s like eight months now, and what bothers me with mosquitoes is that they ambush my kid. Like every morning, I see him scratching his skin and it’s a painful sight. It’s really hard to see your child suffering from these mosquitoes. 

So I was like, “You know what? Target young parents, because this is something that I know that I’m sure that most people don’t even think about it, because they don’t have any kids. Most of the young entrepreneurs, they don’t have kids, they’re not even married, so they will never come up with this idea.” And this is what he suggested that member, and he actually got sales. He started getting sales. And he was like… He said like, “Wow, the targeting worked.” I’m like, “Yeah, it makes sense.”

So something that a friend of mine told me a long time ago, when he told me this targeting secret, I call it, he said like, “When you’re targeting something what is it you know that no one knows?” And I was like, “I don’t understand. What do you mean?” He was like, “If you’re targeting for example, fishing, do you know the name of the… You say like top five brands for fishing rods?” I’m like, “No, I’m not a fisherman, I don’t know.” 

“Exactly. If you’re doing targeting, try to target stuff that most people don’t know about.” And so if you’re going for fishing, for example, for photography, go for brands, go for famous people in this niche because those who know those brands are your buyers. This is pretty much like the concept of targeting. You wanna target the stuff that only the people that are actually your customers, those are the people that you want, know about. So, in photography, for example, we targeted a tripod company name, it’s called Manfrotto. I don’t know if you know that one. Good sign. Ask somebody like, “Do you know this?”

David: I’m not a potential customer, so I…

Mordechai: Yeah you’re not a… That’s great. This is targeting. So if you asked a photographer like, “What is Manfrotto?” He’s like, “Yeah, it’s a tripod company.” Boom, this is your targeting. This is where you’re gonna get started. Just sit down, make your plan, make your strategy plan, learn your audience, learn what you’re going to target, and then go jump, do it.

David: It’s a beautiful place to stop. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat, Mordechai, I appreciate it.

Mordechai: Yeah thank you, thank you.

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