Data Dudes
[00:00:00] Will Christensen: All right. Welcome to this episode of Data Dudes. I'm your host, Will Christensen, and my co-host, Brandon Chekits, and nondeaner here. We are excited to jump in on another episode.
[00:00:09] Nhan Dihn: awesome. I'm excited as well.
[00:00:11] Will Christensen: Sweet. So today, specifically, we're jumping in on something new that we built. So Non joined our team I think it's been about six months ago. No, a
[00:00:21] Nhan Dihn: May of last year,
[00:00:22] Will Christensen: May of last year. So, we're going on, it's going to like seven months now. So none joined our team and became a majority owner in cellar labs, infused with cash.
[00:00:31] Will Christensen: We're excited about everything he's done with us. And he brought back something that cellar labs had at the very beginning, which is a cellar founder. So Brandon Chekits, who's on the call, obviously, Brandon, tell us a little bit. Just briefly, when you got started with all of this, what were you selling?
[00:00:48] Will Christensen: Like why did you automate some of those processes?
[00:00:51] Brandon Checketts: aging history by today's standards. But back in 2013 or something, I ran a book website where I was and then I transformed that into buying and selling books [00:01:00] and media online. So we were buying a bunch of used books from the U. S. Postal Service auction and DVDs and CDs and that kind of thing and reselling those on Amazon.
[00:01:10] Will Christensen: So, I mean, lots of orders coming through there. And that's where the first idea, I mean, you tested out a couple of different ideas you've told me before, which one was the first one that took off for products that you built?
[00:01:20] Brandon Checketts: mean, the first thing we did was when you're selling media products, you're competing against other sellers on the same item. So you're competing for the buy box. And so you try to have the best rate ratings you can have for as far as like your seller rating and your shipping time and all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:34] Brandon Checketts: So we were trying to increase our seller's feedback score. And we were selling products that like we call it loose mixed media, which were DVDs and CDs that had just the disc without any of the artwork or case or anything. And so if people were expecting those things we got negative feedback on them.
[00:01:50] Brandon Checketts: So the reason we wrote feedback genius is to initially talk about or to email customers who placed an order and just remind them that what they just bought was just the [00:02:00] disc and if they wanted the artwork and stuff to cancel the order and go buy it from somewhere else. So that reduced the negative feedback that we got.
[00:02:06] Brandon Checketts: Substantially. So we went from like, you know, this 95 percent positive feedback score to being up in the 98 percent feedback score, which made a difference for buy box and everything else then, and they allowed us to sell more
[00:02:16] Will Christensen: Beautiful. And I mean, that was exciting. Brandon, over time you discovered that your real forte in business was focusing on software. And so you eventually shifted away from selling as much and continued to be the Amazon expert. You are, you know, mentioning, Hey, you should probably have some sort of like, I don't know MWS off token on this thing.
[00:02:36] Will Christensen: And that kind of influenced the Amazon team. That's such a great story to go into that for just a second. What, tell us about the MWS off token?
[00:02:43] Brandon Checketts: well, well, back when we started developing on MWS, there was no back then it was still MWS, obviously we replaced that with the selling partner API recently. But before the auth token was a thing, they used to just ask for your seller, your two public credentials, like. Your merchant ID and your [00:03:00] marketplace ID, are both public things.
[00:03:01] Brandon Checketts: Anybody can find any others, any other person's, merchant ID and marketplace ID, and that was the only authentication that was needed to sign up and connect to an account. So it was extremely insecure. Well, there was a little bit more to it than that, but I'd emailed the lady who was in charge at the time at MWS and pointed out the security flaw.
[00:03:18] Brandon Checketts: And, you know, a few months later, they had introduced this MWS auth token. Which was a third piece of credential, which was private, which made it impossible for somebody to authenticate somebody else's account.
[00:03:27] Will Christensen: Love it. So, and I think my favorite moment in my time at Cellulabs over the past, you know, 18 months has been sitting on a call with a bunch of Amazon developers. And we mentioned that and the guy the API developer that was on the call, his eyes got like, as big as walnuts when we told that story.
[00:03:45] Will Christensen: And then he was like, I think maybe you should teach me about the Amazon API. It was so, it was just awesome to see that. So obviously the API expertise is here and here to stay. And as we gradually drifted [00:04:00] towards being more of a software-focused company, we didn't have as many sellers that were on the executive team.
[00:04:06] Will Christensen: Is that kind of how that laid out Brandon?
[00:04:08] Brandon Checketts: Yeah, it got to be. So, I mean, we had a warehouse where we were doing the books and we had, you know, 16,000-square-foot warehouse and our order management system and stuff. And it got to be where the warehouse was a distraction from the. From the software, we'd have people come in from the warehouse floor, like, saying, I can't find this thing.
[00:04:25] Brandon Checketts: Can you find it in our inventory? And I was like, okay. I had to stop what we were working on software development-wise and then go fix some or investigate some problems and that. So it got to be a distraction and we eventually moved out of the warehouse to a dedicated office space. So we didn't have that.
[00:04:38] Brandon Checketts: And then eventually ended up selling, just selling off that book business as well.
[00:04:42] Will Christensen: Yeah and as we shifted towards that, I think that's part of our history with Cellulabs is we didn't have somebody right in the middle of all of that. And so Brandon and I, talked about this a lot. Like, we need to bring in more sellers. And so the first step there, Brandon brought in his brother, Jordan Chekits, who's a seller, [00:05:00] On the executive team and helped begin the transformation process to help us focus back on sellers.
[00:05:05] Will Christensen: And then, you know, when none expressed some interest in joining us, we got excited. So don't tell us a little bit about why you decided you wanted to do software alongside. Your seven-figure Amazon business,
[00:05:19] Nhan Dihn: well, the software side is also partly because of my background. I graduated with a computer engineering degree from Georgia Tech way back then. Put that away and open a lawnmower repair shop in 2005. And it wasn't until I started selling on Amazon did I pull that degree out again. And basically, we spent a whole year trying to find software that just says, okay, here's my price.
[00:05:43] Nhan Dihn: Here's all the Amazon fees. Am I making any money? Is it profitable or not profitable? If it's not profitable to adjust my price. And I spent a year and I couldn't find it. So I was like, I threw it. We're just going to develop it. So I went and hired people from India. Try that didn't work. Went to the Philippines which didn't work, and went to [00:06:00] Costa Rica which worked okay.
[00:06:02] Nhan Dihn: And then. Finally, we brought people from the U S to develop our inventory management system. So I like that the Amazon business that I ran was very intertwined with the business, with the software side of it, because without software, we couldn't get the advantage and we couldn't run the operations.
[00:06:20] Nhan Dihn: So that's how I got to the software side.
[00:06:22] Will Christensen: and it's amazing. I mean, no you did that. That seven-figure business is a wholesale business, which is fascinating. Like, like that's to do that sort of volume in the wholesale space. And Non has shown me some of his software and it's pretty fascinating to see some of the different pieces of that.
[00:06:40] Will Christensen: And that's part of where our discussion began. You Cellulabs user. And he liked what we were doing. He could see where we were going and we were talking about, you know, developing apps together. And then we brought up this idea of, well, I mean, we're interested in bringing on additional partners and owners, you know, does that sound interesting to you?
[00:06:58] Will Christensen: And, you know, [00:07:00] what did that look like? when we brought that up, what did you think, Nan?
[00:07:02] Nhan Dihn: I was about to pee in my pants. I was like I did not expect this. I was like thinking about through because I'm an intellectual person, right? I like to think things through. So I thought through that. I wanted to launch my own SaaS company. That was like, it's been a dream of mine for years.
[00:07:23] Nhan Dihn: But I didn't even know how to get started. I know how to develop products, but as far as the marketing and the connections I've been thinking about that for the last couple of years. And then when you guys made that offer, I was like, okay, here's an opportunity for me to come in and short-circuit that.
[00:07:36] Nhan Dihn: Process and then you already have an audience and you already know in the and so it has been known in the Amazon space for years already. So that capital that brand capital was enticing for me to come in and build on top of that.
[00:07:53] Will Christensen: Love that
[00:07:54] Brandon Checketts: We also figured out a lot of the multi-tenant things, right? It's 1 thing to build software for your organization, [00:08:00] but it's very different. It doesn't seem like it's that much different, but it's quite a lot different to build it for something that enables many people to use the same software.
[00:08:07] Nhan Dihn: Yeah, those are scaling challenges. I knew that we didn't have the experience with it and we would have to wrestle for years with it to solve those problems.
[00:08:15] Will Christensen: non or Brandon, what was your first impression as Non began to kind of have the discussion, what made you excited about the idea of non joining us
[00:08:25] Brandon Checketts: Well, I think, you know, we've known each other briefly, like, friendly for five years or something like that, right? I remember, I think, we came to one of our events that we held in Athens, and he's
[00:08:35] Nhan Dihn: I want a couple of
[00:08:36] Brandon Checketts: We're an hour away or something. So we'd seen each other a few times and met before. So, yeah, I think when he explained the understanding that he and his team already had about the Amazon API, like if number one, it was like nice to have somebody else to like, talk about that with, because we'd had a few, they didn't get the, they didn't get how bad Amazon was.
[00:08:55] Nhan Dihn: Yeah,
[00:08:56] Brandon Checketts: As far as, like, their development environment and stuff, so it was nice [00:09:00] to see somebody that understood that. So it was kind of an immediate match 1 sort of technologically. We had the same wavelength and then also from a philosophy, like, just a business and trying to do the good type of mentality, I think we're on the same page there.
[00:09:13] Will Christensen: Yeah, agreed that was I was kind of involved in all of that. And I rolled some of my involvement into equity as well. So I'm an owner of the company as well. Minority owner. I'll be clear about that. But I am an owner, of the new version of Seller Labs as well.
[00:09:25] Will Christensen: And I'm super excited about the values. I think that's 1 of the things that I love the most about working with both Non and Brandon we're on the same page where we do have that do-good mentality. And transparency and we're out there to help people grow their businesses and do it, in an upstanding way.
[00:09:43] Nhan Dihn: I agree with that. Like, you know, we met through. Well, we connected even further through a mutual friend, Tyler Jeffcoat. I checked with him to make sure that you guys have the core values, because that's for me, then, like, to go into a partnership, the core value alignment is the, my number one [00:10:00] priority.
[00:10:00] Nhan Dihn: Everything else is solvable. If you can't solve the core value, then nothing else, everything else is going to fall apart sooner or later. And so that's why I wanted to make sure that, especially like, Humble, Hungry, and Smart, like Patrick Lanziano's book, right? To make sure that we're all on the same page in serving like the desire to serve the customers, putting the customers first,
[00:10:19] Will Christensen: So all of that, and Tyler, you mentioned him as well. He's also a minority owner, not on the podcast today. He advises us from afar. We talked to him often, and we honestly wanted him to be involved in that way. As a small owner or a minority owner, he could help us consider where we're going next and add that extra expertise.
[00:10:39] Will Christensen: He's if you need anything, e-commerce accounting-wise, brilliant, just brilliant, man. So,
[00:10:45] Nhan Dihn: really smart guy.
[00:10:46] Will Christensen: so non, as you got your hands dirty here, you took over product. You began to look at this and say, wait, there's an opportunity here to kind of play with this data. And you began to look at the idea of integrating no code into our tool.
[00:10:58] Will Christensen: What did that look like?
[00:10:59] Nhan Dihn: [00:11:00] There are several steps before that. You guys are, have been building this infrastructure with multi-tenancy and infrastructure for basically each seller has their database, and I saw you solve a couple of problems, right? With the Amazon API, you can't just ingest data and expect to be able to use it.
[00:11:18] Nhan Dihn: If there's an interpretation layer, there's a massaging layer, and you can't use that data directly until you put it in an SQL database, at least for querying purposes. So you guys have solved that problem for the most part. And then you've also solved the problem of making it available for anybody else to sign up for their account and connect to the SQL database.
[00:11:40] Nhan Dihn: I saw that as a great value. You know, you guys call that. Data Hub back then, or Data Warehouse and Data Hub back then, and I saw that as an opportunity that regardless of what happens on Amazon, who sells on Amazon, how big they are, you will always need that SQL layer between Amazon and the end seller because of the complexity of Amazon's [00:12:00] data.
[00:12:00] Nhan Dihn: So that I knew that product had to exist. If that product had existed when I first developed software, we would not have to spend so much time and effort in developing our infrastructure to get that data and understanding and massaging it. So, in fact, like, that's my plan is to eventually get the data from cellular labs and just use that.
[00:12:22] Nhan Dihn: Leverage that infrastructure instead of continuing to maintain the infrastructure we have for the direct connection with Amazon's data. So that's the first layer to make that available. The second layer was, okay, now that we make it available, let's easily present the data, for people to use.
[00:12:38] Nhan Dihn: And that's a trial and error. And like, if you know anything about development, the front end, I call it moving pixels. The most time-intensive development part like building infrastructure in the back end is in the business logic is maybe 20%. But the front end how to display it how to like you got to move pixels around, things like that.
[00:12:58] Nhan Dihn: I saw that. [00:13:00] Ticking off most of the time, and we've experimented with a lot of technologies to make that faster. We even use, you know, windows form and we have an app for that. Silver windows, silver, Microsoft, silver light, and other low code. Like quick, I just want to get this data into a table so people can see it.
[00:13:18] Nhan Dihn: Going from data in the sequel to data on a table where people can use it. That was a painful process. And so, that's why I saw when I saw Retool, it was an opportunity for us to speed up that process and get that faster. That's why we lean into that.
[00:13:35] Will Christensen: And what is retooled?
[00:13:37] Nhan Dihn: And so the way I look at it is like a front-end framework. It's a way of developing. You pull data from an SQL database and then you display it in the front end and it took a lot of they develop a lot of great code to create the framework to make that fast.
[00:13:52] Brandon Checketts: Writing like JavaScript to make a button here, like that stuff's all solved and you can really,
[00:13:57] Nhan Dihn: It's just a drag and drop here. Here's a button and then [00:14:00] you can write code to make that button do whatever you want. But at least to make that button, you didn't have to spend several hours just to write the Java code for
[00:14:08] Will Christensen: And Brandon, as you saw, we are not focusing some of our product effort on integrating that way. What do you feel like this? Cause I know from my experience, you know, looking from the outside in when I was at data automation, I know that. Cellular Labs was looking into a lot of different dashboarding technology to try to solve this issue of iteratively fast, you know, insights and massaging a lot of that.
[00:14:33] Will Christensen: How is this, different and or better than what we were doing in the past at Cellular Labs?
[00:14:38] Brandon Checketts: we'd experimented with a few things like that. We looked at Looker back when, before Google bought it we looked at a couple of other competitors, we used the Looker, we paid for the expensive Looker thing for a while and tried to build on it and didn't get it to work.
[00:14:53] Brandon Checketts: I think part of that is because we didn't have the seller sort of mentality that non brings with it as well to, like, figure out, like, [00:15:00] we were, we had data, but we could be showing data on the screen, but it wasn't solving the problem or solving an actual thing that somebody needed. And so I think non brings an interesting and very practical approach to that.
[00:15:09] Brandon Checketts: It's like, what's the job to be done? How does how do we take the data to solve that job? And then retool does a really good job of making it pretty simple for us to, like, connect those dots. Like, here's the problem. Here's the data. And we put it together pretty quickly.
[00:15:21] Will Christensen: Yeah, agreed. So, you've and we're going to go over a bunch of these on these data dudes episodes. Today, specifically, obviously, we gave this giant intro, which we won't do every time, but I thought it was
[00:15:31] Nhan Dihn: Perhaps we should record A separate recording for each app
[00:15:36] Will Christensen: Yeah, well, no, and I think we will we'll tag the tail end of this app specifically onto this episode. I think that's great. And then we can even reference this episode in the future and let people know, like, Hey, if you want to hear the origin story of how these came about. Check out that first episode or that, you know, the third episode but go in with me looking at this specifically around you know, some of the first things you've done you focused on product [00:16:00] reviews.
[00:16:00] Will Christensen: Can you tell us a little bit about what was that you were looking to do and solve? And what, why did you decide to channel some of our energy towards that? Because it wasn't really on the roadmap. It was I kind of want this already. Maybe tell us a little bit about that.
[00:16:15] Nhan Dihn: so, the old software I developed for my company my e-commerce company we call it the tracker. And it's been on the dream list for a while that we want customer feedback because the essence of e-commerce is you deliver a product for a customer and make them happy. Well, in that the loop feedback loop is you need to know if you're developing a bad product, or why the customer keeps returning it.
[00:16:42] Nhan Dihn: So I always dream of an Amazon makes that available right product reviews as well as customer return comments. I always dream of saying okay. When I go into my app, my tracker, I want to be able to say, okay, what is the customer's latest thing? Because sometimes our manufacturers send the wrong products, even though [00:17:00] they say it's the right product.
[00:17:01] Nhan Dihn: Let's say like a Honda mower wheel, they sent a rear wheel to a front wheel. A rear wheel has gears and the front wheel doesn't have gears. And they sent the wrong products and the customers give bad reviews. And we'd have to shut down the listings and recall that product. Well, I was like, it'll be awesome.
[00:17:16] Nhan Dihn: If we can just see the returns that, okay, wrong way. We'll no gears. And we've had to manually go in and dig that information out. Whereas we want to make that as easily available as possible. And just like so much of Amazon's trust is built around reviews. That I saw that.
[00:17:30] Nhan Dihn: Okay, this is a must this. I would love to have it. And you guys back then already have the infrastructure to get the reviews already. So it's just a matter of displaying on the front end in an easy way to solve that was like a test of retooling what we can do.
[00:17:46] Will Christensen: So, without further ado, we've got it right here and we're sharing our screen now. So, you're seeing there on the screen that we have. Those reviews. So, non, do you want to tell us a little bit about what we're seeing here?
[00:17:57] Nhan Dihn: Yeah, so, in here, you [00:18:00] can either look up the by a single SKU, like, you look up a particular ASIN or a single SKU, just select, yeah one of those, um, well, that's probably a slow-moving one, yeah, see, as you can see, the review came up for that particular ASIN on that date. Or you can click on this tab.
[00:18:20] Nhan Dihn: What I love about this is this tab that has all the reviews. So basically all the reviews in your account all like we got 7900 reviews here. 7900 reviews that like is in my in this particular account. And you can find it, and then you can even filter, like search for a particular ASIN here, or for other things, like you filter out a particular word, or things like that.
[00:18:45] Nhan Dihn: That's the infrastructure that Retool has built, and we can leverage that, but to be able to display that quickly and easily to format, to see it, That's why we developed this. It's like, okay, if you know your product, go in and see if there, what is the latest review, do I need to respond to [00:19:00] this review or not?
[00:19:01] Nhan Dihn: So that's the thought process behind building this app. There's like, get it, get to an easy way for people to access it.
[00:19:08] Will Christensen: I think one of my favorite things about the way Retool does it is every single table has some built-in stuff, right? It's got the download button. It's even got this awesome filter where, you know, it's got all you could think of in terms of does not include includes. That's all just built into retooling.
[00:19:25] Will Christensen: It's not something we have to, like, recode out or keep track of. It's just already there.
[00:19:31] Nhan Dihn: And what I love is this button here. This is a copy button. You hit that and then you go into an Excel and you just paste it and it's. Yeah, a new sheet. Just put sheets on new. Yeah. And it just magically appears without having to download. Where did I save that file? Do I have Excel?
[00:19:50] Nhan Dihn: Like all that is just one button and you got all your data. Now you can search pivot. You know the typical stuff you can do with Excel. You can do it here. So that's what I really [00:20:00] love about it.
[00:20:00] Will Christensen: Yeah, highlight, you know, do all of the conditional formatting, anything you want. It's just really handy to go back and forth between the two systems. So non, did you guys integrate this into your current processes at a power? Tell us how you're using it. So
[00:20:14] Nhan Dihn: that's one of the things that we've integrated with at power is We've leveraged Cellular Labs data, and we've pulled it into our tracker is what we call it.
[00:20:26] Will Christensen: You essentially, you don't view it in the view that you gave there. You went in and used the data hub. And all the connections here to make that happen.
[00:20:36] Nhan Dihn: Exactly. My like, not just me, but the team that runs our operation, they can go in and click and view while they're seeing the product, how is it selling, they can see how that like what are the latest reviews for that product
[00:20:52] Will Christensen: Beautiful. And I, obviously there's a lot more to do and we'll go into a lot more of what the data that's there. Do you want to say anything [00:21:00] about, you know, what it took to get all of these reports available for sellers like non?
[00:21:06] Nhan Dihn: you move on? I wanted to show
[00:21:07] Will Christensen: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:21:08] Nhan Dihn: offer.
[00:21:09] Will Christensen: Yeah. Let me stop sharing there.
[00:21:10] Nhan Dihn: so this is our tracker here. This is our list of the SKUs that we're selling. And just the click of a button here, it pulls this goes and gets the data from the Seller Labs account and displays it here and we can
[00:21:25] Will Christensen: is that a retool dashboard right
[00:21:27] Nhan Dihn: Yes, it's a
[00:21:28] Will Christensen: I love it. You put retool inside your app as well. I love that.
[00:21:33] Nhan Dihn: Exactly.
[00:21:34] Will Christensen: Wow. That is so cool that like, I mean, to see an Amazon seller with his software leverage our data to just, I mean, I'm thinking about this from an operations perspective, me, you know, if I'm the guy who's in charge of this product, talk about an important piece of data to have, you know, just at my fingertips, right next to where I see all of my margin and everything else.
[00:21:57] Will Christensen: I love that
[00:21:57] Nhan Dihn: And like I'm hoping to [00:22:00] merge the two products like what we've developed in the past 10 years with my e-commerce company, power equipment and then several labs like build into that.
[00:22:10] Will Christensen: some of that's already happening. We're like the view that we have. We've had those product reviews in our database for a long time. Yeah. And we've never had a real view of them like that. So we're getting back to our roots of a seller who's selling every day, who has a seven-figure company out there on Amazon in the trenches, just like, the other sellers that are out there and, you know, bringing back to those roots.
[00:22:35] Will Christensen: So back to that question for Brandon and any commentary you want to make on what we've talked about thus far, Brandon around the tables.
[00:22:40] Brandon Checketts: think it's cool. This has been, so we had those reviews in our Seller Labs Pro app before, but it was like, you had to use it inside of our app and you had to use our pagination and our filters. And now with retool, you can get all the, like you said, copy and paste it, download it, do whatever you want with it.
[00:22:55] Brandon Checketts: And no one's taking it a step further and integrating it into his software. So anyway, we, [00:23:00] that's one of the things that we realized and kind of one of the things that kicked it off is when we went to this migration from the MWS API to the selling partner API. That was a lot of work that we had to go through and we're like, man, there's value in just doing this work.
[00:23:13] Brandon Checketts: Like other people don't need to do this because we spent so much time and effort understanding the API, the changes, and making it all work. So we kind of went through all that work and we keep all that stuff up so that you, if you're a, if you're a developer, like non, as he's got a technical team doing that, you can integrate it without having to understand all the Amazon stuff.
[00:23:32] Brandon Checketts: And then you can also use it in those sort of no-code tools, like ritual and Google sheets and everything else too.
[00:23:37] Will Christensen: So if you've watched this episode, I'm going to give you a teaser to our next episode. We're going to go into the next thing that Non and Brandon worked on, which was very entertaining to watch them kind of push in on creating a transactions pivot. And kind of picking apart that because non's goal here that I've seen him push on it, he wants to make it so that he can literally [00:24:00] stop pulling data himself from Amazon.
[00:24:02] Will Christensen: He wants to make the data inside. They're so trustworthy that he wants to go get at it. And right now he's already beginning that process because he's gotten us to that point. So it's an iterative process. We're gonna talk about that more in our next episode. All right, over and out, and see you guys next time.
[00:00:00] Will Christensen: All right. Welcome to this episode of Data Dudes. I'm your host, Will Christensen, and my co-host, Brandon Chekits, and nondeaner here. We are excited to jump in on another episode.
[00:00:09] Nhan Dihn: awesome. I'm excited as well.
[00:00:11] Will Christensen: Sweet. So today, specifically, we're jumping in on something new that we built. So Non joined our team I think it's been about six months ago. No, a
[00:00:21] Nhan Dihn: May of last year,
[00:00:22] Will Christensen: May of last year. So, we're going on, it's going to like seven months now. So none joined our team and became a majority owner in cellar labs, infused with cash.
[00:00:31] Will Christensen: We're excited about everything he's done with us. And he brought back something that cellar labs had at the very beginning, which is a cellar founder. So Brandon Chekits, who's on the call, obviously, Brandon, tell us a little bit. Just briefly, when you got started with all of this, what were you selling?
[00:00:48] Will Christensen: Like why did you automate some of those processes?
[00:00:51] Brandon Checketts: aging history by today's standards. But back in 2013 or something, I ran a book website where I was and then I transformed that into buying and selling books [00:01:00] and media online. So we were buying a bunch of used books from the U. S. Postal Service auction and DVDs and CDs and that kind of thing and reselling those on Amazon.
[00:01:10] Will Christensen: So, I mean, lots of orders coming through there. And that's where the first idea, I mean, you tested out a couple of different ideas you've told me before, which one was the first one that took off for products that you built?
[00:01:20] Brandon Checketts: mean, the first thing we did was when you're selling media products, you're competing against other sellers on the same item. So you're competing for the buy box. And so you try to have the best rate ratings you can have for as far as like your seller rating and your shipping time and all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:34] Brandon Checketts: So we were trying to increase our seller's feedback score. And we were selling products that like we call it loose mixed media, which were DVDs and CDs that had just the disc without any of the artwork or case or anything. And so if people were expecting those things we got negative feedback on them.
[00:01:50] Brandon Checketts: So the reason we wrote feedback genius is to initially talk about or to email customers who placed an order and just remind them that what they just bought was just the [00:02:00] disc and if they wanted the artwork and stuff to cancel the order and go buy it from somewhere else. So that reduced the negative feedback that we got.
[00:02:06] Brandon Checketts: Substantially. So we went from like, you know, this 95 percent positive feedback score to being up in the 98 percent feedback score, which made a difference for buy box and everything else then, and they allowed us to sell more
[00:02:16] Will Christensen: Beautiful. And I mean, that was exciting. Brandon, over time you discovered that your real forte in business was focusing on software. And so you eventually shifted away from selling as much and continued to be the Amazon expert. You are, you know, mentioning, Hey, you should probably have some sort of like, I don't know MWS off token on this thing.
[00:02:36] Will Christensen: And that kind of influenced the Amazon team. That's such a great story to go into that for just a second. What, tell us about the MWS off token?
[00:02:43] Brandon Checketts: well, well, back when we started developing on MWS, there was no back then it was still MWS, obviously we replaced that with the selling partner API recently. But before the auth token was a thing, they used to just ask for your seller, your two public credentials, like. Your merchant ID and your [00:03:00] marketplace ID, are both public things.
[00:03:01] Brandon Checketts: Anybody can find any others, any other person's, merchant ID and marketplace ID, and that was the only authentication that was needed to sign up and connect to an account. So it was extremely insecure. Well, there was a little bit more to it than that, but I'd emailed the lady who was in charge at the time at MWS and pointed out the security flaw.
[00:03:18] Brandon Checketts: And, you know, a few months later, they had introduced this MWS auth token. Which was a third piece of credential, which was private, which made it impossible for somebody to authenticate somebody else's account.
[00:03:27] Will Christensen: Love it. So, and I think my favorite moment in my time at Cellulabs over the past, you know, 18 months has been sitting on a call with a bunch of Amazon developers. And we mentioned that and the guy the API developer that was on the call, his eyes got like, as big as walnuts when we told that story.
[00:03:45] Will Christensen: And then he was like, I think maybe you should teach me about the Amazon API. It was so, it was just awesome to see that. So obviously the API expertise is here and here to stay. And as we gradually drifted [00:04:00] towards being more of a software-focused company, we didn't have as many sellers that were on the executive team.
[00:04:06] Will Christensen: Is that kind of how that laid out Brandon?
[00:04:08] Brandon Checketts: Yeah, it got to be. So, I mean, we had a warehouse where we were doing the books and we had, you know, 16,000-square-foot warehouse and our order management system and stuff. And it got to be where the warehouse was a distraction from the. From the software, we'd have people come in from the warehouse floor, like, saying, I can't find this thing.
[00:04:25] Brandon Checketts: Can you find it in our inventory? And I was like, okay. I had to stop what we were working on software development-wise and then go fix some or investigate some problems and that. So it got to be a distraction and we eventually moved out of the warehouse to a dedicated office space. So we didn't have that.
[00:04:38] Brandon Checketts: And then eventually ended up selling, just selling off that book business as well.
[00:04:42] Will Christensen: Yeah and as we shifted towards that, I think that's part of our history with Cellulabs is we didn't have somebody right in the middle of all of that. And so Brandon and I, talked about this a lot. Like, we need to bring in more sellers. And so the first step there, Brandon brought in his brother, Jordan Chekits, who's a seller, [00:05:00] On the executive team and helped begin the transformation process to help us focus back on sellers.
[00:05:05] Will Christensen: And then, you know, when none expressed some interest in joining us, we got excited. So don't tell us a little bit about why you decided you wanted to do software alongside. Your seven-figure Amazon business,
[00:05:19] Nhan Dihn: well, the software side is also partly because of my background. I graduated with a computer engineering degree from Georgia Tech way back then. Put that away and open a lawnmower repair shop in 2005. And it wasn't until I started selling on Amazon did I pull that degree out again. And basically, we spent a whole year trying to find software that just says, okay, here's my price.
[00:05:43] Nhan Dihn: Here's all the Amazon fees. Am I making any money? Is it profitable or not profitable? If it's not profitable to adjust my price. And I spent a year and I couldn't find it. So I was like, I threw it. We're just going to develop it. So I went and hired people from India. Try that didn't work. Went to the Philippines which didn't work, and went to [00:06:00] Costa Rica which worked okay.
[00:06:02] Nhan Dihn: And then. Finally, we brought people from the U S to develop our inventory management system. So I like that the Amazon business that I ran was very intertwined with the business, with the software side of it, because without software, we couldn't get the advantage and we couldn't run the operations.
[00:06:20] Nhan Dihn: So that's how I got to the software side.
[00:06:22] Will Christensen: and it's amazing. I mean, no you did that. That seven-figure business is a wholesale business, which is fascinating. Like, like that's to do that sort of volume in the wholesale space. And Non has shown me some of his software and it's pretty fascinating to see some of the different pieces of that.
[00:06:40] Will Christensen: And that's part of where our discussion began. You Cellulabs user. And he liked what we were doing. He could see where we were going and we were talking about, you know, developing apps together. And then we brought up this idea of, well, I mean, we're interested in bringing on additional partners and owners, you know, does that sound interesting to you?
[00:06:58] Will Christensen: And, you know, [00:07:00] what did that look like? when we brought that up, what did you think, Nan?
[00:07:02] Nhan Dihn: I was about to pee in my pants. I was like I did not expect this. I was like thinking about through because I'm an intellectual person, right? I like to think things through. So I thought through that. I wanted to launch my own SaaS company. That was like, it's been a dream of mine for years.
[00:07:23] Nhan Dihn: But I didn't even know how to get started. I know how to develop products, but as far as the marketing and the connections I've been thinking about that for the last couple of years. And then when you guys made that offer, I was like, okay, here's an opportunity for me to come in and short-circuit that.
[00:07:36] Nhan Dihn: Process and then you already have an audience and you already know in the and so it has been known in the Amazon space for years already. So that capital that brand capital was enticing for me to come in and build on top of that.
[00:07:53] Will Christensen: Love that
[00:07:54] Brandon Checketts: We also figured out a lot of the multi-tenant things, right? It's 1 thing to build software for your organization, [00:08:00] but it's very different. It doesn't seem like it's that much different, but it's quite a lot different to build it for something that enables many people to use the same software.
[00:08:07] Nhan Dihn: Yeah, those are scaling challenges. I knew that we didn't have the experience with it and we would have to wrestle for years with it to solve those problems.
[00:08:15] Will Christensen: non or Brandon, what was your first impression as Non began to kind of have the discussion, what made you excited about the idea of non joining us
[00:08:25] Brandon Checketts: Well, I think, you know, we've known each other briefly, like, friendly for five years or something like that, right? I remember, I think, we came to one of our events that we held in Athens, and he's
[00:08:35] Nhan Dihn: I want a couple of
[00:08:36] Brandon Checketts: We're an hour away or something. So we'd seen each other a few times and met before. So, yeah, I think when he explained the understanding that he and his team already had about the Amazon API, like if number one, it was like nice to have somebody else to like, talk about that with, because we'd had a few, they didn't get the, they didn't get how bad Amazon was.
[00:08:55] Nhan Dihn: Yeah,
[00:08:56] Brandon Checketts: As far as, like, their development environment and stuff, so it was nice [00:09:00] to see somebody that understood that. So it was kind of an immediate match 1 sort of technologically. We had the same wavelength and then also from a philosophy, like, just a business and trying to do the good type of mentality, I think we're on the same page there.
[00:09:13] Will Christensen: Yeah, agreed that was I was kind of involved in all of that. And I rolled some of my involvement into equity as well. So I'm an owner of the company as well. Minority owner. I'll be clear about that. But I am an owner, of the new version of Seller Labs as well.
[00:09:25] Will Christensen: And I'm super excited about the values. I think that's 1 of the things that I love the most about working with both Non and Brandon we're on the same page where we do have that do-good mentality. And transparency and we're out there to help people grow their businesses and do it, in an upstanding way.
[00:09:43] Nhan Dihn: I agree with that. Like, you know, we met through. Well, we connected even further through a mutual friend, Tyler Jeffcoat. I checked with him to make sure that you guys have the core values, because that's for me, then, like, to go into a partnership, the core value alignment is the, my number one [00:10:00] priority.
[00:10:00] Nhan Dihn: Everything else is solvable. If you can't solve the core value, then nothing else, everything else is going to fall apart sooner or later. And so that's why I wanted to make sure that, especially like, Humble, Hungry, and Smart, like Patrick Lanziano's book, right? To make sure that we're all on the same page in serving like the desire to serve the customers, putting the customers first,
[00:10:19] Will Christensen: So all of that, and Tyler, you mentioned him as well. He's also a minority owner, not on the podcast today. He advises us from afar. We talked to him often, and we honestly wanted him to be involved in that way. As a small owner or a minority owner, he could help us consider where we're going next and add that extra expertise.
[00:10:39] Will Christensen: He's if you need anything, e-commerce accounting-wise, brilliant, just brilliant, man. So,
[00:10:45] Nhan Dihn: really smart guy.
[00:10:46] Will Christensen: so non, as you got your hands dirty here, you took over product. You began to look at this and say, wait, there's an opportunity here to kind of play with this data. And you began to look at the idea of integrating no code into our tool.
[00:10:58] Will Christensen: What did that look like?
[00:10:59] Nhan Dihn: [00:11:00] There are several steps before that. You guys are, have been building this infrastructure with multi-tenancy and infrastructure for basically each seller has their database, and I saw you solve a couple of problems, right? With the Amazon API, you can't just ingest data and expect to be able to use it.
[00:11:18] Nhan Dihn: If there's an interpretation layer, there's a massaging layer, and you can't use that data directly until you put it in an SQL database, at least for querying purposes. So you guys have solved that problem for the most part. And then you've also solved the problem of making it available for anybody else to sign up for their account and connect to the SQL database.
[00:11:40] Nhan Dihn: I saw that as a great value. You know, you guys call that. Data Hub back then, or Data Warehouse and Data Hub back then, and I saw that as an opportunity that regardless of what happens on Amazon, who sells on Amazon, how big they are, you will always need that SQL layer between Amazon and the end seller because of the complexity of Amazon's [00:12:00] data.
[00:12:00] Nhan Dihn: So that I knew that product had to exist. If that product had existed when I first developed software, we would not have to spend so much time and effort in developing our infrastructure to get that data and understanding and massaging it. So, in fact, like, that's my plan is to eventually get the data from cellular labs and just use that.
[00:12:22] Nhan Dihn: Leverage that infrastructure instead of continuing to maintain the infrastructure we have for the direct connection with Amazon's data. So that's the first layer to make that available. The second layer was, okay, now that we make it available, let's easily present the data, for people to use.
[00:12:38] Nhan Dihn: And that's a trial and error. And like, if you know anything about development, the front end, I call it moving pixels. The most time-intensive development part like building infrastructure in the back end is in the business logic is maybe 20%. But the front end how to display it how to like you got to move pixels around, things like that.
[00:12:58] Nhan Dihn: I saw that. [00:13:00] Ticking off most of the time, and we've experimented with a lot of technologies to make that faster. We even use, you know, windows form and we have an app for that. Silver windows, silver, Microsoft, silver light, and other low code. Like quick, I just want to get this data into a table so people can see it.
[00:13:18] Nhan Dihn: Going from data in the sequel to data on a table where people can use it. That was a painful process. And so, that's why I saw when I saw Retool, it was an opportunity for us to speed up that process and get that faster. That's why we lean into that.
[00:13:35] Will Christensen: And what is retooled?
[00:13:37] Nhan Dihn: And so the way I look at it is like a front-end framework. It's a way of developing. You pull data from an SQL database and then you display it in the front end and it took a lot of they develop a lot of great code to create the framework to make that fast.
[00:13:52] Brandon Checketts: Writing like JavaScript to make a button here, like that stuff's all solved and you can really,
[00:13:57] Nhan Dihn: It's just a drag and drop here. Here's a button and then [00:14:00] you can write code to make that button do whatever you want. But at least to make that button, you didn't have to spend several hours just to write the Java code for
[00:14:08] Will Christensen: And Brandon, as you saw, we are not focusing some of our product effort on integrating that way. What do you feel like this? Cause I know from my experience, you know, looking from the outside in when I was at data automation, I know that. Cellular Labs was looking into a lot of different dashboarding technology to try to solve this issue of iteratively fast, you know, insights and massaging a lot of that.
[00:14:33] Will Christensen: How is this, different and or better than what we were doing in the past at Cellular Labs?
[00:14:38] Brandon Checketts: we'd experimented with a few things like that. We looked at Looker back when, before Google bought it we looked at a couple of other competitors, we used the Looker, we paid for the expensive Looker thing for a while and tried to build on it and didn't get it to work.
[00:14:53] Brandon Checketts: I think part of that is because we didn't have the seller sort of mentality that non brings with it as well to, like, figure out, like, [00:15:00] we were, we had data, but we could be showing data on the screen, but it wasn't solving the problem or solving an actual thing that somebody needed. And so I think non brings an interesting and very practical approach to that.
[00:15:09] Brandon Checketts: It's like, what's the job to be done? How does how do we take the data to solve that job? And then retool does a really good job of making it pretty simple for us to, like, connect those dots. Like, here's the problem. Here's the data. And we put it together pretty quickly.
[00:15:21] Will Christensen: Yeah, agreed. So, you've and we're going to go over a bunch of these on these data dudes episodes. Today, specifically, obviously, we gave this giant intro, which we won't do every time, but I thought it was
[00:15:31] Nhan Dihn: Perhaps we should record A separate recording for each app
[00:15:36] Will Christensen: Yeah, well, no, and I think we will we'll tag the tail end of this app specifically onto this episode. I think that's great. And then we can even reference this episode in the future and let people know, like, Hey, if you want to hear the origin story of how these came about. Check out that first episode or that, you know, the third episode but go in with me looking at this specifically around you know, some of the first things you've done you focused on product [00:16:00] reviews.
[00:16:00] Will Christensen: Can you tell us a little bit about what was that you were looking to do and solve? And what, why did you decide to channel some of our energy towards that? Because it wasn't really on the roadmap. It was I kind of want this already. Maybe tell us a little bit about that.
[00:16:15] Nhan Dihn: so, the old software I developed for my company my e-commerce company we call it the tracker. And it's been on the dream list for a while that we want customer feedback because the essence of e-commerce is you deliver a product for a customer and make them happy. Well, in that the loop feedback loop is you need to know if you're developing a bad product, or why the customer keeps returning it.
[00:16:42] Nhan Dihn: So I always dream of an Amazon makes that available right product reviews as well as customer return comments. I always dream of saying okay. When I go into my app, my tracker, I want to be able to say, okay, what is the customer's latest thing? Because sometimes our manufacturers send the wrong products, even though [00:17:00] they say it's the right product.
[00:17:01] Nhan Dihn: Let's say like a Honda mower wheel, they sent a rear wheel to a front wheel. A rear wheel has gears and the front wheel doesn't have gears. And they sent the wrong products and the customers give bad reviews. And we'd have to shut down the listings and recall that product. Well, I was like, it'll be awesome.
[00:17:16] Nhan Dihn: If we can just see the returns that, okay, wrong way. We'll no gears. And we've had to manually go in and dig that information out. Whereas we want to make that as easily available as possible. And just like so much of Amazon's trust is built around reviews. That I saw that.
[00:17:30] Nhan Dihn: Okay, this is a must this. I would love to have it. And you guys back then already have the infrastructure to get the reviews already. So it's just a matter of displaying on the front end in an easy way to solve that was like a test of retooling what we can do.
[00:17:46] Will Christensen: So, without further ado, we've got it right here and we're sharing our screen now. So, you're seeing there on the screen that we have. Those reviews. So, non, do you want to tell us a little bit about what we're seeing here?
[00:17:57] Nhan Dihn: Yeah, so, in here, you [00:18:00] can either look up the by a single SKU, like, you look up a particular ASIN or a single SKU, just select, yeah one of those, um, well, that's probably a slow-moving one, yeah, see, as you can see, the review came up for that particular ASIN on that date. Or you can click on this tab.
[00:18:20] Nhan Dihn: What I love about this is this tab that has all the reviews. So basically all the reviews in your account all like we got 7900 reviews here. 7900 reviews that like is in my in this particular account. And you can find it, and then you can even filter, like search for a particular ASIN here, or for other things, like you filter out a particular word, or things like that.
[00:18:45] Nhan Dihn: That's the infrastructure that Retool has built, and we can leverage that, but to be able to display that quickly and easily to format, to see it, That's why we developed this. It's like, okay, if you know your product, go in and see if there, what is the latest review, do I need to respond to [00:19:00] this review or not?
[00:19:01] Nhan Dihn: So that's the thought process behind building this app. There's like, get it, get to an easy way for people to access it.
[00:19:08] Will Christensen: I think one of my favorite things about the way Retool does it is every single table has some built-in stuff, right? It's got the download button. It's even got this awesome filter where, you know, it's got all you could think of in terms of does not include includes. That's all just built into retooling.
[00:19:25] Will Christensen: It's not something we have to, like, recode out or keep track of. It's just already there.
[00:19:31] Nhan Dihn: And what I love is this button here. This is a copy button. You hit that and then you go into an Excel and you just paste it and it's. Yeah, a new sheet. Just put sheets on new. Yeah. And it just magically appears without having to download. Where did I save that file? Do I have Excel?
[00:19:50] Nhan Dihn: Like all that is just one button and you got all your data. Now you can search pivot. You know the typical stuff you can do with Excel. You can do it here. So that's what I really [00:20:00] love about it.
[00:20:00] Will Christensen: Yeah, highlight, you know, do all of the conditional formatting, anything you want. It's just really handy to go back and forth between the two systems. So non, did you guys integrate this into your current processes at a power? Tell us how you're using it. So
[00:20:14] Nhan Dihn: that's one of the things that we've integrated with at power is We've leveraged Cellular Labs data, and we've pulled it into our tracker is what we call it.
[00:20:26] Will Christensen: You essentially, you don't view it in the view that you gave there. You went in and used the data hub. And all the connections here to make that happen.
[00:20:36] Nhan Dihn: Exactly. My like, not just me, but the team that runs our operation, they can go in and click and view while they're seeing the product, how is it selling, they can see how that like what are the latest reviews for that product
[00:20:52] Will Christensen: Beautiful. And I, obviously there's a lot more to do and we'll go into a lot more of what the data that's there. Do you want to say anything [00:21:00] about, you know, what it took to get all of these reports available for sellers like non?
[00:21:06] Nhan Dihn: you move on? I wanted to show
[00:21:07] Will Christensen: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:21:08] Nhan Dihn: offer.
[00:21:09] Will Christensen: Yeah. Let me stop sharing there.
[00:21:10] Nhan Dihn: so this is our tracker here. This is our list of the SKUs that we're selling. And just the click of a button here, it pulls this goes and gets the data from the Seller Labs account and displays it here and we can
[00:21:25] Will Christensen: is that a retool dashboard right
[00:21:27] Nhan Dihn: Yes, it's a
[00:21:28] Will Christensen: I love it. You put retool inside your app as well. I love that.
[00:21:33] Nhan Dihn: Exactly.
[00:21:34] Will Christensen: Wow. That is so cool that like, I mean, to see an Amazon seller with his software leverage our data to just, I mean, I'm thinking about this from an operations perspective, me, you know, if I'm the guy who's in charge of this product, talk about an important piece of data to have, you know, just at my fingertips, right next to where I see all of my margin and everything else.
[00:21:57] Will Christensen: I love that
[00:21:57] Nhan Dihn: And like I'm hoping to [00:22:00] merge the two products like what we've developed in the past 10 years with my e-commerce company, power equipment and then several labs like build into that.
[00:22:10] Will Christensen: some of that's already happening. We're like the view that we have. We've had those product reviews in our database for a long time. Yeah. And we've never had a real view of them like that. So we're getting back to our roots of a seller who's selling every day, who has a seven-figure company out there on Amazon in the trenches, just like, the other sellers that are out there and, you know, bringing back to those roots.
[00:22:35] Will Christensen: So back to that question for Brandon and any commentary you want to make on what we've talked about thus far, Brandon around the tables.
[00:22:40] Brandon Checketts: think it's cool. This has been, so we had those reviews in our Seller Labs Pro app before, but it was like, you had to use it inside of our app and you had to use our pagination and our filters. And now with retool, you can get all the, like you said, copy and paste it, download it, do whatever you want with it.
[00:22:55] Brandon Checketts: And no one's taking it a step further and integrating it into his software. So anyway, we, [00:23:00] that's one of the things that we realized and kind of one of the things that kicked it off is when we went to this migration from the MWS API to the selling partner API. That was a lot of work that we had to go through and we're like, man, there's value in just doing this work.
[00:23:13] Brandon Checketts: Like other people don't need to do this because we spent so much time and effort understanding the API, the changes, and making it all work. So we kind of went through all that work and we keep all that stuff up so that you, if you're a, if you're a developer, like non, as he's got a technical team doing that, you can integrate it without having to understand all the Amazon stuff.
[00:23:32] Brandon Checketts: And then you can also use it in those sort of no-code tools, like ritual and Google sheets and everything else too.
[00:23:37] Will Christensen: So if you've watched this episode, I'm going to give you a teaser to our next episode. We're going to go into the next thing that Non and Brandon worked on, which was very entertaining to watch them kind of push in on creating a transactions pivot. And kind of picking apart that because non's goal here that I've seen him push on it, he wants to make it so that he can literally [00:24:00] stop pulling data himself from Amazon.
[00:24:02] Will Christensen: He wants to make the data inside. They're so trustworthy that he wants to go get at it. And right now he's already beginning that process because he's gotten us to that point. So it's an iterative process. We're gonna talk about that more in our next episode. All right, over and out, and see you guys next time.
