7 Hot Products From 7-Figure Dropshipper Paul Lee

Paul: Understand that this is a numbers game. If you decide to get into dropshipping, you must commit to finding your first winning product.

Jessica: Paul is a numbers guy and one thing that makes this interview really different is how many numbers Paul ended up sharing throughout our discussion. You’re gonna find out exactly what gross profit margin you need to sell products and still make a profit, you’re also gonna find out the six criteria to look for in high potential products. 

You’re gonna learn how many ad sets to put in each campaign, how much to budget for your first dropshipping store and exactly what numbers in your Facebook ads will tell you whether or not you’re onto a hot product. Make sure you have a place to write all this info down because it’s gonna come at you fast.

Jessica: Meet Paul.

Paul: Hey, what’s up? 

Jessica: Paul’s dropshipping journey began when he tried to grow a beard. Instead of growing a full-blown beard, Paul built a full-blown dropshipping brand that made $112,000 in one year. Since then, Paul has sold that business and gone on to start more profitable dropshipping businesses and he’s now a seven-figure dropshipping entrepreneur. 

Paul’s gonna share his product recommendations for 2020. Paul not only shares great tips on what to sell but he also tells you how to sell them and who to sell them to. Paul, let’s get started.

Paul: Alright, let’s do it.

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The Start of Paul’s Dropshipping Business

Jessica: Paint me a picture of what life was like for you right before you started dropshipping. Were you in school were you working, what was going on? 

Paul: Yeah, so I was just collecting debt as a freshman in college and I just was working server four years and I just did not see the future in this and I just questioned why I was in school. I was taking a marketing class. The first day I took that class, I dropped out immediately.

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Jessica: Really? 

Paul: Because the marketing teacher she had never started a business yet she was trying to teach me how to start a business and I’m not in school to just learn to take tests to pass tests, I actually wanna learn how to market so I went on YouTube and I learned… I could actually learn more on YouTube as opposed to in this college class. Dropped out, started dropshipping, eventually quit school eventually quit my job and here we are.

Jessica: So that’s the condensed version of a lot of massive success.

Paul: Yeah.

Jessica: Take me to that first dropshipping business that you started or I don’t know if it even was a dropshipping business at first but what was that first business idea? 

Paul: So the first business idea was beard growth products ’cause as an Eastern Asian man, a lot of us don’t have any beards so I just wanted to beat the stereotype, be that first or be one of the very few Asian guys that have massive beards. So I learned that there’s a huge community of similar-minded people trying to grow beards all over the world. 

So I set out a mission to create a beard growth formulation and that, unfortunately, failed after like three months of every single day, doing hours and hours of research, spending money on chemists, formulating products and doing a bunch of research and yeah, that ultimately did fail.

Jessica: So what’s interesting to me is this business started as a product you were trying to design and create yourself and then at what point did you discover and decide to go with dropshipping? 

Paul: So right when I realized that it wouldn’t work, the beard growth formulation, I was like, “I’m just not gonna take his failure. I know so much about beards I know so much about the community, might as well do something with this knowledge.” And then I figured out the beard care industry is actually a huge multi-million dollar industry and I was like “You know, people are already buying this.”

Jessica: Right, so you have all this knowledge about a particular niche and if you just let it all wither away that’d be such a waste of time.

Paul: Yeah, I just didn’t wanna take that and I knew people were already selling these beard care products, people were already buying them so I might as well… I searched on AliExpress, found actually a lot of good beard care products and I was like, “Let me just casually list these on my store,” and then I got more serious with it. Copied other successful beard brands and then just went from there.

Jessica: And another thing I think that really stands out about your story is that you were successful enough at dropshipping that you created your own brand, so you actually had your brand on the products, right? A lot of dropshippers are concerned that they can’t sell anything unless it has their own branding on it. How would you respond to that? 

Paul: I would actually say that you should figure out if the product is selling and then decide to maybe invest more money into stock having the logo on it. I’d say actually for beginners, it’s really risky to just buy a bunch of inventory with your logo on it assuming that it’s gonna sell. So I would take the reverse approach and this is what I did.

I tested a bunch of different products, figured out one particular product was selling well and then I decided “Okay, I’m gonna buy just 100 units. It’s not a very big risk.” And then after that sold out, bought 500 and then bought 1,000 so it was very gradual and very low risk.

Jessica: And now at this point, you have sold that business and you’ve started new ones, yeah? 

Paul: Yeah.

Jessica: What else are you up to these days? 

Paul: So right now, I’m actually just working on a couple of stores and mostly my VAs manage that so in my free time, I’m actually doing mentorship. So it’s like a one-on-one mentorship. I notice nobody’s really doing this. Once people buy a dropshipping course, they don’t have that ongoing mentorship.

So that’s really where I came and I basically I’m there in their pockets, every single day. Okay, does this ad look good? Should I kill this ad set? Should I scale this ad set? Oh, PayPal just banned me, what should I do? How should I respond? This product… is this worthy to test? Any questions that you want to ask? That’s the role I fulfill.

Jessica: Great, well, I’m gonna make you fulfill that role today ’cause I’ve got a lot of questions about the products you recommended.

Paul: Okay.

Jessica: Ready to answer them? 

Paul: Sounds good, yeah.

Jessica: Let’s get started.

Paul: Let’s do it.

1. ‘I Love You’ Projection Ring

Jessica: Okay Paul we’re looking at the first product you recommend which is a projection light ring. Now, this ring has over 3,000 orders and I’ve seen it before. In fact, I think we might have even talked about it before so one thing that I wanna ask you right out of the gate is, is this product saturated? 

Paul: In order to figure that out, we’d have to use Facebook video search, so just search up the product name and then look at the view counts and also the upload date. So whenever you look at the information, if it’s within the month and it has like a million-plus views. That’s pretty saturated. 

But if it’s from eight-plus months ago, then… And it had that many views and not recently that many views, then that’s a kind of good sign that nobody’s testing this right now. Or not that many people are testing this, so it’s a potential opportunity to try and sell that product.

Jessica: Interesting. So you’re telling people not only look for the Facebook ads with a lot of views but keep in mind that customers have short memories and within eight months, they can forget that they saw this ad and they might be interested in it again.

Paul: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: That’s not something that we hear a lot on the show. That’s a really good tip.

Paul: Yeah, it’s like you can recycle these winners and a lot of times I’ve figured out, the best dropshipping products, they’re not fresh. They’ve been recycled, year after year. So, for example, some summer products they sell hot in June and then people forget about them and then starting in May, somebody re-introduces it. The first person to re-introduce that product typically can just reuse an old video and make that a winner again.

Jessica: Why did you pick this as one of your products? What stood out about it to you that was positive? 

Paul: So I actually saw this product, not only on Facebook but I saw it on Reddit and a lot of times I go on Reddit, you can see extremely viral product-based video gifs or something like that so I saw a video of this on the highway or something, somebody was spinning it and it had 100,000 upvotes and the comments were like, “Oh where can I get this? Oh, that’s so cool. I know somebody who would like this.” So I just saved it and then I just immediately imported it.

Jessica: Now, if you don’t mind sharing, are there particular Reddit threads that you find a good source of ideas? 

Paul: So there are a couple, I can’t remember the exact wording.

Jessica: We can help you with that and drop them into the description later.

Paul: I think it’s called “Damn, I want that,” or “Shut up and take my money“. And I would just say those two in particular, though.

Jessica: Now, I’m curious to know… Okay, you found this product, you know people want it. I go here, I see it costs less than $2 and then shipping with ePacket is like $3 so it ends up being less than $5. Most dropshippers would say multiply that by three, so we’d get $14.99 possibly for a product but if you’re telling me everyone on Reddit wants this, then I’m tempted to say, “Let’s price this high.”

Paul: Yeah. I’m honestly leaning towards high, too. When you see a product like this, it’s a ring so rings automatically have that high perceived value, so if you price this thing at $15 people think that this is a $15 product so it’s not that special when you buy it for that special someone but if they spend some money on this, then it increases their satisfaction that I invested in this product for that somebody ’cause they’re special.

So for this product, I’d probably maybe even go up to $60. If that doesn’t necessarily work, I do $39.99 and let’s just say if that does not work, last resort, I’d go $29.99 but never, nothing lower than that.

Jessica: I know a lot of dropshippers would get nervous because they know how cheap this product is priced on AliExpress and they’re thinking, “Oh my gosh, if I price it for $60 or even $30, that’s too high.”

Paul: Yeah.

Jessica: Do you have personal experience seeing that you can price products high and still get sales? 

Paul: Yeah so in my first ever dropshipping store, The Beard Store, I had a product that was selling for $16.99 and then at the end of the year, it was selling at $29.99. So a tremendous difference. It has everything to do with perceived value. Like for example, that beard comb that I sold had a silver screw, that was selling for $19.99. I asked my supplier to change that with a golden screw, like a copper screw and then automatically perceived value goes up the roof, $29.99.

Jessica: Just with that one little screw? 

Paul: Just with that one little screw, yeah.

Jessica: Incredible.

Paul: It’s crazy. Yeah.

Jessica: Interesting, really cool. Okay, I have some more questions about how you find and test products but I would say let’s dive into that with the next product suggestion.

Paul: Sure.

2. Garage Storage Organizers

Jessica: Paul, this product is a wall-mounted mop holder. Is that how you would characterize it? 

Paul: I would name it something like “garage storage organizer” something along the lines of that but…

Jessica: Why? 

Paul: Because if you just say mop holder, they think it’s only from mops or something like that. We wanna say, this is all-inclusive, like utensil or have some sort of broad word that categorizes any kitchen, any garage, any product like that.

Jessica: Okay, how did you find this product on AliExpress? 

Paul: So that’s interesting. I actually found this product through Amazon’s best-sellers page.

Jessica: Did you? 

Paul: And I usually don’t use that as a source but I know some people do and it works out. So I noticed that it just shot up the roof on the best sellers rank and then I was like, “Huh, can I find this on AliExpress?” Found it and then yeah, if it worked on Amazon, chances are, it’s probably gonna work on Facebook.

Jessica: Now, one thing that I’m curious about is, we often tell dropshippers you should find a product with a “wow factor.” To me, this doesn’t have a wow factor, it’s not like light-up unicorn slippers or something.

Paul: Yeah.

Jessica: So how do you grab people’s attention with a product like this? 

Paul: So this product, I would definitely lean towards a video ad. You can’t really just sell it with an image like that. So a video, for example, you would have something like a very messy garage with the rake, with all these different things that are just everywhere and then all of a sudden, you have stacked like a five-second clip of somebody putting all their things on it and then… That would kind of trigger the wow factor. 

So with the wow factor, a lot of times the product innately has that wow factor, just in the way it’s designed or just the functionality of it but sometimes you can take a video and make an average product that doesn’t necessarily seem like it’s a wow factor and make the video have that kind of wow factor effect.

Jessica: The wow here is not so much as the product but the before and after that the product can kind of enable.

Paul: Kind of like that, yeah.

Jessica: Okay.

Paul: And also the value that it would provide for those very handy men, those people that are always at home, those… That certain type of audience.

Jessica: On the subject of handymen or handy-women, how would you find your target audience for this with a Facebook ad? 

Paul: So whenever I approach targeting on Facebook, the first thing is I don’t really think too much about it, I just enter the product name. So this would be like, “organizer”, and then if that suggestion is there, I click on that, and then hit suggestions and then this process… It’s really a brainstorming process. You’re not thinking too much, you’re just selecting everything that’s relevant on the Facebook suggestion so maybe rake, maybe garage, maybe tools whatever and then you get some inspiration from that. And then okay… You just say rake, “Oh, a rake is also similar to this thing.” Then you just kind of brainstorm through all that process.

Jessica: I think you are the first dropshipper to suggest entering the product name or something like the product name as an interest. Usually, people are putting in niches. I think I over-research it, I think I’m like, “What clubs do they belong to?” And I try to guess but that’s really practical. Think about how broadly you could describe this product and use that to start building interests with a Facebook audience.

Paul: Exactly, yeah.

Jessica: Here’s a question though, that I know all of our new dropshippers are going to ask. After they create this video ad showing before and after and then they target people who like rakes, organizers and garages, they launch the ad, maybe they’re spending $5 to $10 a day on it, what number should they look at to determine if this ad is performing well?

Paul: So the first thing when you just start an ad set, you’re not gonna get in the ads cards or any purchases like in the very beginning. The first thing you should look at is cost per click, specifically the unique cost per link click and that number will tell you a good indicator of what this product or what these ad sets are gonna look like when you spend $10, $20. So this cost per unique link click, I always kill it, if it’s above $2 or above $2.50. So if I spend $5 on an ad set and only get two clicks. I’m immediately done. I’m not gonna spend any more on it.

Jessica: I hope you guys write that down because that is really golden advice. It’s very rare that dropshippers can give such good concrete benchmarking numbers like that.

Paul: So yeah, there are actually two more. So let’s say if it does have a lot of link clicks and it’s very cheap like a dollar or something, then I wait until it spends $10 and if it doesn’t even have any initiate check-outs or ads cards by that point, then I usually kill it. And then also let’s say, it does have a couple of ads cards or initial check-outs, $15 is the next barrier. If it doesn’t have any purchase by $15, you can be a little lenient, maybe $15 to $18 something around there. If it doesn’t have any sales, I usually kill it too.

Jessica: I see what you’re doing. Basically the cost per unique click is telling you whether your ad is effective and if it’s cheap, that’s like… That’s great, people are clicking it.

Paul: Exactly.

Jessica: And then you’re looking at these, “Okay, people are clicking but are they buying?” And that’s where the thresholds for total ad spend come in.

Paul: Exactly.

Jessica: Really cool.

Paul: With dropshipping, it’s really a numbers game, so, we want to prioritize our marketing budget on products that are getting a bunch of clicks, a bunch of purchases on day one and day two. Those are the best dropshipping products. A hot product always looks like a hot product on day one and day two.

Jessica: Does it? 

Paul: Typically. Yes, from my experience, yes.

Jessica: Okay. I am excited to ask you a lot more about budgets and for that, let’s move on to the next product.

Paul: Alright. Let’s do it.

3. Tactical Work Pants

Jessica: Paul, this product… These are called Tactical Work Pants.

Paul: Yep.

Jessica: It sounds like I’ve never seen these in stores before but I think I kinda get it, they have lots of pockets for people to stuff stuff into. Why are you choosing this as a product for dropshippers? 

Paul: So again, I’m not sure if I would necessarily test this product. It meets the criteria but you should always do the research, competition, saturation and things like that or unless you wanna take a spin on it and do a new video, a fresh new advertisement, a fresh new angle, then you can make saturated products… You could… There is no such thing as saturation but you can also make saturated products work. 

So what I really like about this is that it already has a good video attached to it and also the audience is huge. You could expand to multiple niches. So for example, you could do construction workers, that’s like 50 million people. You could do certain sports categories like fishermen, and you can do like electricians, contractors, and these niches are in the millions, like 10s and 20, 30 million. So if one niche works, you can move on to the next niche, the next niche, the next niche so it’s virtually infinitely scalable.

Jessica: And so, for each of those niches would you create a new or different ad that speaks for that niche? 

Paul: So, in the first one you’re testing, I typically just do one to two creatives just because we don’t know if this product is gonna sell. We don’t wanna put too much work into this but once we figure out this product is selling very well, then I might do some extra work on the creatives, making a very tailored focus to whoever who I’m selling it to. So, yeah, I would do that.

Jessica: You’re starting to talk about multiple creatives and stuff and I can smell the fear of new dropshippers through the camera here thinking “Oh my gosh, multiple creatives means multiple ads which means multiple $10 a day ad campaigns,” and they’re just wondering, “How much money do I need to get started with dropshipping?”

Paul: Okay, so to get started with dropshipping, people like to set the benchmark $500 and mostly, I would agree with that. But with $500, it’s very limiting. You can’t really have any room to test products, you have to be extremely strict with, “Okay, I’m gonna test this product only and not these products even though I like them.” So, $500 is very limiting. I’d say $1,000 is very comfortable.

Jessica: Thank you for giving a number because I’ve asked that to other dropshippers and I know it can be really difficult to land on a number. If you are thinking about starting a dropshipping store, you’ll need to know how to budget for that store. One more question about this before we move on to the next product, pants require sizes, is this a product that you would recommend for a new dropshipper or is it a little bit more advanced because you need size charts? 

Paul: So there’s not really any level of difficulty for the products that you’re gonna test.

Jessica: Okay.

Paul: But generally that is true. Clothing and jewelry, those… And watches, those are kind of risky, kind of difficult. Not difficult but just hard to make sure that the quality is there and the size and stuff like that. But a product like this, we see that it has good reviews and we see that the reviews have pictures of men putting the pants on and we can assume that the sizing is somewhat relevant, somewhat accurate.

And then, of course, you should have all of the size charts in your description and also, Europe versus the United States, they have different metrics, they have different conversion so you should do that for them. Some people don’t know what inches are converted to centimeters or something like that. So you should also provide that.

Jessica: So it takes a little bit of extra work but it’s totally possible to sell this product.

Paul: Definitely.

Jessica: Awesome, let’s move on to the next product to sell.

Paul: Let’s do it.

4. Pet Igloo Bed

Jessica: This product is a pet bed. It’s called, in fact, like a pet igloo. I love the pet niche. 

I know it’s really a profitable dropshipping niche but I know it’s also getting more and more competitive. How do you stand out with a product like this? 

Paul: So a product like this, it already stands out. You wouldn’t necessarily stand out from your competitors. You would find that the product stands out and pick that product before the competitors. Or let’s say that it was already saturated, then you would kind of come up with a new creative, a new angle, new ways to make a saturated product work, essentially. But a product like this stands out because it’s a very emotional product. 

Consumers are really, they’re willing to spend on their pets, not really because they need it but because out of love, out of empathy, out of… It’s a very emotional kind of purchase. So if you kind of present that to them and present them that emotional aspect, then they’re gonna rationalize and say, “Oh, it actually is getting kinda colder in our house.” So first, they’re hooked in with the emotion. Then, they rationalize it with logic, and then, they purchase it.

Jessica: Okay, I kind of get that. What I’m wondering is, if a dropshipper wants to sell this pet bed, what does their store look like? Is it a one-product store with just this, is it a niche store for, I don’t know, other igloo stuff or other pet beds or is it a general pet niche store? 

Paul: It could honestly be either one but if you’re a beginner, This is very controversial. Everybody has their own insights and stuff and I’m not saying they’re wrong but for me, I never recommend a one-product store for beginners because it’s very hard to look at a product and say that this is the product that’s going to sell, this is the product that’s going to work, I’m gonna make a lot of money on this product. 

You can’t really say that when you haven’t tested it so if you do the whole thing of creating a store, doing all of this upfront work and you’re not sure it’s gonna sell, it’s very risky but a product like this would sell very well on a general store, a niche store and if you did have a one-product store it would work as well. So yeah, just, it’s very open.

Jessica: Okay, so it’s not… Would you say it’s very important then, for dropshippers to choose a niche, for example, cat accessories versus general pet beds or is it not that important?

Paul: So if you wanna have a more catered store, what I would actually recommend is an “industry store”. So this is actually something I termed. It’s basically a hybrid between general and niche so let’s say, if we were in the pet industry, we would sell anything, any pet product, like parrots, birds, dogs, cats, hamsters, anything like that as opposed to a very niche store, that’d just be a dog store. So you can only sell dog-related stuff so I would say if you do wanna have a catered store, make it very broad but I have several niches inside of that store.

Jessica: That’s a lot of setup time though, right? You need to… You can’t just create a general pet store with five products in it. That would look weird. So you kind of need… Like how many products should a new dropshipper stuff into that store before they start advertising it, so the store looks legit? 

Paul: When people land on your link on Facebook, they’re not analyzing your store. They’re not making sure, “Okay.” They’re not checking the boxes, is this legit, it this store… Does this store have a good collection, does this store have a lot of different products.

They just wanna know that it looks good, the site looks good ’cause if it looks good, then they’re gonna intuitively think, “Okay, this is somewhat trustworthy. Somebody actually put effort into this.” And the product photos, if those look good and stuff like that, everything looks good and clean, then they’re gonna trust your website, essentially.

Jessica: I see.

Paul: So most of the time, people are just on the product page and then they might go to the home page but they’re definitely not gonna dig through your whole entire store.

Jessica: Okay. I want to get some product page tips from you and I think I will get them with your next product suggestion.

Paul: Okay.

5. Heated Car Seats

Jessica: Paul, your next product is something that will set car seats on fire, it looks like.

Paul: Yeah. That’s funny actually. An image like that as a thumbnail, it just… You can’t help but ignore it. So that could also help I think.

Jessica: And it’s actually heated car seats for people who didn’t get my excellent sense of humor. I said that I wanted to ask you about product pages and I’d love to do that with this. How might you broadly structure a product page for these electric car seat heating covers? 

Paul: I would approach this product, the product page, the way I would with every other product page. This product isn’t necessarily special in terms of my process. So the process is, I just choose the listing that has the best pictures so as you will tell, a product is duplicated like tens and 20 times on AliExpress, sold by different listing. So you wanna select the listing that has the best pictures, essentially and ideally the most reviews, the most sales, and then choose that. 

The reason you do that is for marketability. The best pictures have the highest conversion rates, and then, just do the process of writing a product description by searching your competitors, kind of replicating the content that already exists and doing the reviews. Having a lot of images in your descriptions also help and then having your description by very readable. 

So oftentimes I see my mentees, they have long paragraphs, they have no breaks. People are not gonna read that at all. So you wanna break those up with pictures and a lot of times if you have features in your description you can have a picture representing each feature. So picture, feature, picture, feature and it helps with reading the content, consuming the concept.

Jessica: Yeah, a lot of people don’t think of product pages as a place where you can format and use boldface and insert pictures and stuff like that and even videos but…

Paul: Definitely, yeah.

Jessica: The text field in your product description space in Shopify is pretty rich. You can edit it. Now I wanna ask you about legal liability.

Paul: Oh snap.

6. Foldable Baby Stroller

Jessica: Paul, you recommend this stroller as a dropshipping item and two things about this give me a little bit of hesitation. The first is the price, it’s over $100.

Paul: Yup.

Jessica: So would you dropship this for $300? 

Paul: I wouldn’t price it that high, necessarily. I’d probably price this product at, let’s say the net cost cost maybe $130, I’d probably price this around $169, $189 maybe even $199, and with free shipping.

Jessica: Sorry, why is the pricing different for more expensive products? 

Paul: Because it really just comes down to the margin. So if you think on margins, above a $30 gross margin is definitely very, very healthy. $20 is pretty standard, pretty decent. Anything below $15 is very dangerous territory because a couple of bad ad days would easily drive you into unprofitability. So aim for at least $20.

Jessica: At least $20 profit margin.

Paul: Gross profit margin.

Jessica: Gross profit margin. Okay, this is interesting because I think a lot of dropshippers are looking at inexpensive products, like $5 products and they’re thinking, “Great, I’ll sell this for $15,” but that only gives them a $10 gross profit margin, right? 

Paul: Exactly yeah.

Jessica: So, you’re saying, look at the products that cost a little bit more so that you can price them a little higher and get at least a $20 gross profit margin.

Paul: Not necessarily. Not look, not find the products that are more expensive but whatever the price range is, aim for $30, aim for $20.

Jessica: I see. Okay, really, really helpful. That said, a big concern that I have with this stroller is that it is something you put an infant in to protect the infant and I get worried that dropshippers might expose themselves to liability with a product like this.

Paul: Yes, I do tend to stay away from products that have that kind of very high risk but with a product like this, I see that it has 92 reviews. I would collectively look at all the reviews to see if, for this exact product, see collectively all the reviews, see if it’s… Are there any concerns? If there is any review that says something like, something that’s very concerning then I probably would just move on to the next product.

Jessica: Okay, would you find this product from multiple suppliers and look at those reviews too? 

Paul: Yeah, so I would try and find which one has the best reviews and then I would just look at the product in general, see if that product is being sold by different suppliers and what are everybody’s general reviews looking like.

Jessica: Okay, one thing that does make this product appealing is it comes with a video ad. Do you recommend that dropshippers use the AliExpress video ads or do you think “Listen, every other dropshipper is gonna use this ad. Go ahead and create your own.”

Paul: To answer your question, I definitely would not say no to using the video. If it’s a good video, definitely use it, by all means.

7. LED Light Strip

Jessica: Cool. Now we’re looking at an LED light strip. Now, earlier you mentioned criteria that you follow to find these potential gold mine products. What criteria are you looking for? 

Paul: I have six criteria. The first one is it has to have an innate wow factor, either in the product or either in the video. The second thing is it has to solve a problem or add value. If you break down every single product, that’s the reason we buy it. It solves a problem or adds value. The third thing is the profit margin. Is there a potential to make at least a good profit margin? 

And then there’s marketability. How can we use the existing footage on the AliExpress product page or the photos and stuff? Is its perceived value high enough for us to sell it in our store? And then this is an optional one but broad market appeal. The broader the market, the higher you can scale and then the last thing is timing, definitely. So you wanna aim for untapped products, fresh products or old products.

Jessica: Old products. Is this going back to what you were saying about the fact that you can recycle products? 

Paul: Yeah, so eight months is usually the earliest for an old product so eight months to a couple of years is generally an old product.

Jessica: You mentioned that you like products that appeal to broad audiences but when we were talking about those pants, you were talking about how you like it because it’s not like you would target one broad audience, you just had so many niche audiences that you could target that the total audience was broad. Would you do the same thing with these lights? Are you thinking of several niche audiences to target? 

Paul: When I see this product, I see that we have gaming, definitely gaming, we have computers, consoles, certain video games so that’s already multiple niches right there and then we have potential people who like LEDs. So if you just type in LEDs as a Facebook interest you’re gonna see a couple of them and then you also have home decor, people living in dormitories, students. So you have to be able to look at a product and see who all could potentially buy this product.

Jessica: If a new dropshipper wants to sell this product and they do want to target those different audiences, do you recommend they do that all in their first ad campaign? So like one ad set per different audience with the same creative or how do you structure that? 

Paul: So each product gets its own campaign, right? So each campaign has five ad sets minimum, 5 to 8 ad sets, whatever your budget is, at $8 to $10 a day and these interests, you want to be diverse, you want to be broad yet specific. So whenever I choose my interest, I always come up with like 20 interests and then always do the process of elimination. See which ones are the broadest, which ones are specifically relevant and then which ones are diverse. 

So a lot of my students ask me what do I mean by diverse? So if you’re selling a pet product, you do not wanna just sell that pet product to dog breeds. You want to be selling it to dog breeds, dog magazines, public figures that are related to dogs, dog food brands so that’s what I mean by diverse.

Jessica: I see, okay, it’s really helpful to hear you talk through how you would structure your Facebook ad sets and just in general, I have to say, you have been one of the richest sources of information in a single interview that we’ve ever done on this show. So this has been great but before I let you leave, what is one piece of advice you would give new dropshippers in 2020? 

Paul: Understand that this is a numbers game. If you decide to get into dropshipping, you must commit to finding your first hot product because before you ever find your first product, you’re gonna face a lot of discouragement. You’re gonna be putting in a lot of money towards these products and putting in a lot of work as well and to ultimately not be making any money, it’s very discouraging. Everybody goes through that and it’s very discouraging. So you have to look on the bright side, just focus on that one product that’s going to basically recover all of those losses plus give you a very handsome amount of profit.

So I would just say, just continue to persist and don’t believe that it’s too late ’cause it’s never too late. There’s always gonna be a limitless supply of good dropshipping products and there is really no differentiation between you and the very successful dropshippers. If you have a great product and we don’t, you’re going to outpace us essentially. So just focus on that and don’t be discouraged.

Jessica: And where can people follow up with you for more information? 

Paul: Yeah, so you guys can check out my YouTube channel, it’s Ecom Paul and I also do one-on-one mentorship. So it’s at ecomswift.com. You can apply there and we can get in touch.

Jessica: Thank you, everyone, and thank you, Paul.

Paul: Thank you.

Jessica: And until next time, learn often, market better.

Paul: And sell more.

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