Amazon Mastery With Shaahin Cheyene

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

The future of commerce is online and mastering online marketplaces is something that anyone with anything to sell dreams about. We do live in fortuitous times because that wish of yours might just come true with Amazon Mastery, a new online course created by Shaahin Cheyene, the world’s #1 Amazon Accelerator. Sales has been Shaahin’s life and passion since his teenage years, when he became known as the “King of the Thrill Pill Cult” for dominating the rave scene in the 90s with his legal drug brand, Herbal Ecstacy. Shaahin founded his latest company, Accelerated Intelligence in 2009, which became one of the first sellers on Amazon. He has since developed an absolute mastery of all the tricks that it takes to dominate the site. Listen to his interview with John Livesay to learn the most important things you need to have if you want to succeed in the world’s biggest eCommerce platform.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Amazon Mastery With Shaahin Cheyene

My guest on the show is Shaahin Cheyene, who has a new book out and an online course about Amazon Mastery. We talk about how important it is to not only convert, and you need to speak Amazon’s language to do that, and also get in the top ranking. He said the keys to that are authority and social proof. He shows examples of finding out what your 20% effort is that gives you 80% of the results. Enjoy the episode.

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My guest is Shaahin Cheyene, who was born in Iran. He’s an award-winning entrepreneur, writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He’s the CEO and Chairman of Accelerated Intelligence. Through Accelerated Intelligence and Amazon Marketing & Advertising Agency, he manages the selling of his products and helps other brand owners to scale their online sales, not just on Amazon, but other marketplaces like eBay, Shopify and Walmart. He shares his passion for Amazon through his Amazon course entitled Amazon Mastery, which I have had the privilege of taking. It is incredible and full of information. He also has a new book coming out that we’re also going to talk about, which has a very compelling title that we’ll ask him about to explain, which is Billion: How I Became the King of the Thrill Pill Cult. Shaahin, welcome to the show.

John, it’s great to be on.

I love asking my guests to tell me their story of origin. In your case, you can go back to your days in Iran. Tell us what’s in this book you’ve written called Billion: How I Became the King of the Thrill Pill Cult. That is part of your story of origin before you became an Amazon expert.

I was born in Iran, in Tehran. I grew up there until I was about five years old to a solid middle-class family of Persian Jews, then revolution happened in Iran. My family was highly motivated to move out of what became the Islamic Republic of Iran. We landed in the US where we became lower middle class to the beginnings of poor from the standpoint of the kids that I was going to school with in a little enclave here of Los Angeles called Brentwood. I grew up around kids who had summer homes, their parents had multiple cars and all types of luxuries. I didn’t eat out at a proper sit-down restaurant until I was twelve.

It was not something that we did. If I needed clothes, me and my brother would go down to my dad’s dry cleaners in Westwood. We would keep our eyes open for clothes the customers had left behind for a year or more. Sometimes we’d get lucky, but usually our clothes would be several sizes too big for us. It’s an ongoing joke with me and my brother because we would wait by the door and look for people coming in who had a cool look. We would hope secretly that they wouldn’t come back to pick up their clothes because we knew that’s what we’d be wearing the next season.

From there, I decided that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I don’t know how, but school life was very tough growing up an Iranian in the United States during a time where there was extreme prejudice against people from Iran. This was all during the Iran-Contra and things started heating up at home. I decided I’m going to go out on my own and I was going to leave home. I left home right around fifteen and went about my way. I discovered a mentor somewhere in Venice Beach who mentored me and started out in the rave scene, throwing underground parties, breaking into warehouses, having someone hop the electrical pole to get power, bring it in several car speakers to make sound and doing all kinds of stuff like that.

We’re running illegal rave parties in the early ‘90, Los Angeles rave scene. It led me to a discovery that the only people making money in the rave scene, including the DJs and the promoters were the people who were selling drugs. For them, the supply of the most popular drug at the time, ecstasy, which is what they call Molly now had run out. It had completely been wiped off the tables. They were unable to get it. There were all types of dangerous stuff being sold as ecstasy. When people are at parties, raves and clubs, and they’re having a good time, they’re with their friends, and they’re enjoying life, they don’t have time to do a chemical analysis of the pills being sold to them.

This was causing some turmoil. I thought to myself, “What if I could break-in to this niche? If I could create a legal and safe alternative that wouldn’t hurt people and that people could use as an alternative, I’d be doing very well.” Long story short, I formulated a product in a girlfriend’s bathtub at the time somewhere in West Hollywood. I started going to the clubs and figuring out a way to convince the drug dealers who were pedaling real drugs to sell my pills.

Let’s pause for a second there so people can get a real picture. The cover of your book has a picture of you in this era with long hair wearing this pink guru gown on this very psychedelic cool background. If they’re looking at your headshot of the handsome guy you are now, they may not even recognize it as the same person.

That is right. I was long haired, defiant to no end, rebellious teenager who happened to be running $1 billion company with 200 employees, and had zero history in business, zero experience. I was a high school dropout. I never completed ninth grade and flying by the seat of my pants. The funny thing was that I had a system at the time, which I called suicide margins. What that meant to me was that I would make more money to solve all problems. I knew that if a problem arose, it would be easier for me to make more money to throw at it at that time, because we were printing money with these pills, than to go through the long process of fixing problems, building systems, and doing all that. The one system I had in place is make so much money that if something comes up, you can throw money at it and solve it. If somebody steals product, no problem.

How did you convince those drug dealers to sell your “herbal ecstasy” which is 100% legal to create this whole smart drug movement?

It all started out with one moment in one rave where I showed up. It was a huge rave. I was nervous and shaking. I had a backpack full of goof-filled capsules because that’s all we had at that time. There were either balls or capsules. I hadn’t gotten to commercial production. I was packing the stuff myself in a basement, kitchen and bathroom of girlfriends at the time. I showed up at the club with a backpack full of pills that I had very carefully packed in little baggies with a little card inside with a picture of a butterfly and an E in it. They were out of drugs at this party. I walked up to the biggest drug dealer in there and I said, “You’re going to go to jail. There are undercovers here. I’ve got a way for you to get out of it.”

At first, he was very aggressive and standoffish. I said, “Sell my stuff.” He said, “What?” I said, “Sell my stuff.” He said, “Give me some and I’ll try it.” He tried it. He was enjoying life in that moment. He took the whole backpack full, sold it all within minutes, and then came back asking me for more, which I nervously had to decline because I didn’t have any. I’d have to run back to the girlfriend’s bathtub and continue to produce more. He got my number. I got a pager and more people came on. He brought on others and more and more people came on. It grew from one guy in one club to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 guys to the point where we created $1 billion in revenue.

 

In my upcoming book, I tell the story where I’m sitting in my office and the news breaks to me that we broke the $1 billion mark in sales. I’m sitting there going through my books, talking to the people sitting there. I did not even know how much $1 billion was. You could have told me and I wouldn’t have known. They wanted me to be on one of these big talk shows. It was Montel Williams. I was nervous because this was pre-internet and I didn’t know what $1 billion was. I was like, “Is he going to ask me how much a billion is? I don’t know what a billion is. Is it British billion, American billion?” I’m looking through encyclopedias. I’m like, “What are we going to do?”

Someone’s like, “Listen, idiot, they’re not going to ask you how much a billion is. They probably already know, but the bigger problem is they’re going to try to ambush you.” We have this whole situation developed where I’m going on this national talk show. I knew that I was being ambushed. Meaning that they were going to juxtaposition me, the fifteen-year-old, wearing Teva sandals, sweatpants or medical scrubs because I thought those were comfortable. I didn’t want to think about dressing. I had two modes. I had medical scrubs and I had sweats. That’s all I would ever wear anywhere, all in one color.

I decided to do the show anyway because I knew that even though they were going to have old government people against me, they were going to try to do some big thing where they would confront me on the air and prove how wrong I was that I was going to capitalize on that. What I did was I printed up t-shirts with our 800-number spread across the top. Before the internet, there was this thing called 800-numbers. I got to explain this to all the Millennials.

Pager was originally for drug dealers, doctors, and then actors waiting for their agents to page them. Now you have a pager to promote these drugs.

They’re going to be googling what a pager is. I had my pager and I had these t-shirts with our 800-number emblazoned across the top of them. I had a team go out and hand them out to everybody in the studio audience before, and then we gave them sweaters to put over them so they wouldn’t get busted. We gave them free pills. It was like a big party outside when the producers came up, they did not understand what was going on.

To be clear, those pills work quickly. It’s not like you have to wait an hour to feel a difference.

It’s 15 to 45 minutes was very effective depending on your bodyweight and metabolism. I had people who it affected them within 5, 10 minutes. For some people, if your metabolism is a little slower, it might take longer. If you’ve got a lot of food in your belly, it might take longer. Somebody may have incentivized some of the people on that show to stand up and wear our t-shirt on the show. The show host who later turns out may or may not have been a little dyslexic and didn’t read on the show because he was unable to do so.

[bctt tweet=”What is your 20% effort that gives you 80% results?” username=”John_Livesay”]

He pretended like he would read, he would hold up a package and he would say what the producers told them to say or what was on the prompter. I didn’t realize that this was happening. When the show aired, our 800-number was on everything. We made hundreds of millions of dollars from the airing of that show and others because my 800-number was on my shirt. We had government people saying, “This product could be dangerous.” They had Concerned Moms of America and DARE. They’re like, “Don’t buy this. It could be dangerous. This could very well be dangerous.” What are people hearing? What do you think they’re hearing, John?

When you say don’t, your subconscious doesn’t hear it. They’re hearing, “Buy this.”

When they’re saying it’s dangerous, that translates to the mind of all these people that maybe it does work. The real controversy in people’s minds were, “If I’m going to drop $20 on this, is it going to work?” That was the real controversy. The controversy on the news was, is it dangerous or is it not? The fact is people are willing to take a very high degree of risk in order to have a good time.

The younger you are, the more tolerant you are. You feel immortal and maybe not worried about anything happening. It has been many years and now Accelerated Intelligence has not the same product, but other products that have all kinds of enhancements around memory. I want to take us to that journey a little bit so we can get to the Amazon stuff, but it’s a fascinating launch of a career. It also stuck and morphed into something called Accelerated Intelligence.

I wouldn’t say morphed. I would say I learned a lot of lessons along the way. When you are a teenager and making hundreds of millions of dollars leading off to creating over $1 billion in value, before your 21st birthday, you learn a lot. Since then I created a number of companies, many of which failed, a few succeeded, which brings me to where I am now. I’ve got three lines of business. One is we make and sell products on the Amazon platform and beyond. We’ve got 300 different products in health and wellness, tea and supplements. We’ve got Excelerol, which is a fantastic brain supplement.

We sell one called FOCUS+ which people love, but we make all types of products. In addition to that, we have an agency where we do that for Fortune 50s, Fortune 500s. We charge some unreasonable amount of money, and we’ve got probably more demand now than we do have time and supply for our service. Somewhere along the ways, we figured out how we could win using the Amazon algorithm to our advantage. It seems now especially in COVID times, that’s something everybody wants to do with their product. We get brands approaching us all the time for that.

Let’s talk about one of those brands because what I love most among many things about you, your persona, your passion, your intelligence and grit is this organic Matcha DNA. That’s one of your products. There are a lot of places that sell matcha green tea. People are aware of the benefits of it from immune system stuff. You figured out a way because this is what you do for everybody, how are we going to make our organic Matcha DNA show up in an Amazon search, so that when someone puts into Amazon green tea, yours is going to be one of the ones that comes up. Maybe walk us through that path as an explanation of how you help others find a product, get it to appear on the first page of Amazon results, and then what that does for people’s income and life.

 

If you want to achieve success, you have to be able to find the one thing that’s going to be the most fruitful for the effort that you’re putting out. There’s a great book by Gary Keller called The ONE Thing. I’m sure you’ve read that, where he explores that. Not only that, what you have to do is you have to do an analysis of all of your efforts. In that analysis, there’s another great book by a guy named Richard Koch, The 80/20 Principle, which is based on the Pareto Principle. This guy a long time ago figured out that 20% of our efforts bring about 80% of our results. What is your 20%? When we look at Amazon, we look at all the stuff that people do to sell products online. What’s that one thing that you can do that can put your brand, your product above all the others?

The important thing on Amazon above and beyond all other things is ranking and being able to get visibility, but that’s not the only thing. Once you have that ranking, you have that visibility, you have to be able to convert. You have to be able to get them to buy your product. We do that by being able speak the language of Amazon and that has to do with influence. Another great writer, a man named Dr. Cialdini, who you’ve had on this show.

He wrote a great book called Pre-Suasion.

Also, Influence, I’m honored to be sharing the same airwaves, but he talks about the key factors of influence. I’ll give you two, which is the 20% to the 80%, even when it breaks down to influence. That’s social proof and authority. Those two things with any product make a big difference when you’re selling on Amazon. In my course, I’ve got a lot of students now who learn from us. A lot of people come to us and they’re like, “We’d love to use your service.” I’m like, “We’re ridiculously expensive.” They’re like, “You’re right. We can’t afford you. Thanks.”

We have a course people can take and do it themselves. The course is pretty reasonable. It’s not for everybody, but for the right people, it could be a game changer. We teach them how to do what we do using influence, using storytelling, which you are the master of on the Amazon platform. Learning how to sell products and create this real estate where they have this recurring revenue stream that’s happening for them day after day, week after week, making money while they sleep. That’s what we teach.

We’re both such fans of Dr. Robert Cialdini and Influence. There are three steps in any process. There’s the attract, convert and deliver. Most people have some challenges on the first two steps, but once they get hired to deliver something, they’re pretty good at it. What is so great about you is you walk people through all three steps. If you happen to say, “I want to sell something, but we need to import it from China.” There might be some delivery hold ups or what have you, that would impact your business.

You have been through enough of these to know the warning signs so that people don’t get stuck in the delivery part. That’s such a key part of expectations around anything I buy on Amazon. It better be here at least by tomorrow, if not a drone delivering it within the hour. When we talk about this first concept of attract what you describe as ranking to show up, that in of itself is worth the price of your course. People spend thousands of dollars to have that same result in Google searches. You are the expert on that for Amazon, but it’s not enough to show up. You got to show up as your best self and your brand and the packaging. The conversion starts the minute that page downloads in my humble opinion.

A lot of people feel like they lose the sale at the end of the sale when they ask someone to buy. In your case, it would be the click here. I’m saying most of those sales are lost if that packaging doesn’t match who I think of myself as. It may be the least expensive, but I’m going to buy something that appeals to me. Maybe we should talk a little bit about authority as it relates to packaging. Those two things are tied together. Do you agree?

I’m going to push back a little bit on that with you because I know that you are a master salesman. You are a master of pitch, one of the best in the world. With that, I see where you’re coming from wanting to always put excellence forward. I’ve known you for a couple of years now. I always see you bringing excellence to what you do. That’s admirable. With products, however, on the Amazon platform, and I’m only talking about Amazon and selling on Amazon, sometimes you have to be careful not to have perfection paralysis, which is something that a lot of people suffer from. This line of conversation, I’m so glad that you brought it up because it’s so important, especially in these days of everything being politically charged, COVID, and all this stuff happening. We tend to gravitate towards black and white. Things are not black and white. They are nuanced.

In the order of selling on the Amazon platform, there is a lot of nuance there. I get students who come to me who cannot launch a product because they are so tied up in excellence. I say, “It’s good to be excellent, but you also need to do what Seth Godin talks about. You need to ship. Your product is good enough for what it is. Ship and fix the problems as you go.” Sometimes that’s a tactic that’s better than working out all the kinks and making it excellent and the best possible thing you can put out. This is a principle that I teach in my book because when you are sleeping, your enemies are planning your demise.

Two things. One, we talked about a mutual friend, Jay Salmon’s great line that, “Failure is just feedback. You keep going until you get a zombie idea. It’s so great it won’t die,” which gets you out of that perfection paralysis. I teach people all the time, let go of perfectionism and think of yourself as a progressionist. Start celebrating progress so that you don’t wait to launch something. Looking at my own website and the speaking video I’ve created multiple times and keep enhancing it. From where it was to where it is now is night and day. If I didn’t start, it wouldn’t have ever started to evolve. I agree with you that don’t let perfectionism stop you from launching and testing something.

If we take a look at the authority that organic Matcha DNA has and the social proof that you have from Dr. Eric Wood, who you were nice enough to introduce me to, that’s an example. It’s got authority plus social proof and great packaging. That all combines to tell this story. We’ve been able to bring those two things to life a little bit, but taking an example of when you look at this item. There are a lot of things you could open with. I tell people the same thing is true of a recipe, a job interview, when they describe what they’re looking for, and when you’re promoting details of the product. Put the most compelling thing upfront. Don’t bury the lead as they say in journalism. A lot of people could say, “I’m a left-brain person. I’m going to talk about how lab tested for lead this is.”

You lead with delicious and nutritious. That’s so smart because matcha green tea has a reputation for not exactly tasting very good. Sometimes it can be a little bitter for some people. The fact that you opened with that, pulls us into that story. We keep reading about how it’s certified, the doctor, and the way that it’s packaged. Here’s what I do in storytelling. When I give a fact or feature about something, I encourage people to say this phrase, “What that means to you is.” If we’re talking about something being certified BPA free packaging, and you’re the only one that does that, what that means to people is, then I’ll let you fill in the blank there.

It’s healthy.

[bctt tweet=”To sell on Amazon, you have to learn the Amazon language to convert customers. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

If you’re buying something organic, but it has a BPA in it, you’re taking away from it. That’s your unique selling point, but you lead with delicious and nutritious. When you’re talking about the nuances that are in your course, this is what we’re talking about?

Not every approach is right for everybody. What I’m hearing from you is that you want to lead with the one thing that your audience or your product avatar, whoever is buying your product wants to hear the most, the lead point of influence. That makes perfect sense to me.

Buy emotionally and then back it up with logic. If you’re putting the description of your item and logic at the top, they may not read down to the emotional hook first.

It depends on the product. This is the nuances that we’re talking about. You might have coat hangers and all coat hangers are the same. Your proposition there might be, “You get five more with us,” and then you would lead with that. It could be that, “We’re the low-price leader. We’re the same as all the other guys, but we’re $1 cheaper. Save that dollar.” It’s whatever that influencing factor is that will lead them to make a buying decision. It’s going to be different. For every product. I’m 100% on board with that.

Since you’ve been through my storytelling format, let’s leave everybody with an actual case story so that they can see themselves in the story, and want to go on the journey with you of becoming a master of Amazon. If you have a client in mind that you can tell a case story about, we’ll start with the exposition, their name, maybe the first name for anonymity purposes, where they live or approximately how old they are. Paint that picture a little bit for us if you have a case story in mind.

We don’t believe in anonymity here. All of my students, once they come on board, they know they’re on board. I will tell you this story. Me and my wife decided to have a kid several years ago. They grow up fast. My wife was working for the United Nations under Kofi Annan during Kofi Annan’s reign at the United Nations. She was a big-time publicist working for the UN and in government positions. Directly under Kofi Annan, who was her boss, was the head of the United Nations. We decided to have a kid and she said, “There’s no way I’m going to be able to do that high-level international politics work.” She came home. We had the baby. During that whole time, she was like, “I got to do something. I can’t just be a mom. I’d like to do something that brings in some money.”

By osmosis, she was watching me help clients and students, and mentor people. She just listened in and was like, “Honey, I think I can start an Amazon company.” I said, “You can do it. I’ll help you with whatever time you have.” She figured out, “I’ve got two hours a day when the kid’s sleeping or at the babysitter. I can do it.” She launched a company selling greeting cards and girly things that I don’t understand, recipe tips and floral flowery things that I have very little connection to. I would never think that somebody would need a recipe tin in this day and age. When she told me, “They don’t have an iPhone. What’s wrong? Why do they need a recipe tip?”

She is now doing close to $500,000 a year in sales working about four hours a week from home. She’s doing it by selling these products on Amazon. She expanded out to Etsy using our algorithms and the stuff that we teach. She sells on eBay. Day after day, we’re on vacation. We’re in Tulum sitting on the beach. She’s got her phones dinging with orders. She gets that tone and she loves it. We joke around about that and she’s adding products all the time. It’s amazing because she gets an opportunity to be a mom, to be a wife, to hang out with our family and friends and do that, and still bring in that revenue. That’s one of the amazing opportunities that Amazon has been affording its sellers and why it’s such an important company. We take that money and we turn it into other products and cashflow producing real estate.

Let me break that down for people to learn how to tell stories as well as you did. What is your wife’s name?

Her name is Matisse.

Several years ago, she became a new mom and we know that she had a very high-powered job before. The problem was she didn’t want to just be a mom and yet she only had two hours in a day as a full-time mom to juggle all this. We have a pretty good picture and a lot of women can relate to this. What I find fascinating about that story is even after your child got older, she could have decided to go back to work after they started school, she realized that the lifestyle and the freedom and the money is probably even better than she had when she was working for somebody that was such a high demand job.

We have the exposition. We know how long ago. We know the problem and then we go to the solution, which is an unexpected solution of something. The way you told that was like, “I would never think anybody needs it, but we have a way of testing it, and sure enough, it proved out to be something.” You then give us the solution of $500 million in eight years, four hours a week. You’re like, “That sounds like something I’d like to learn how to do.” The resolution is what brings that story home. Now we’re visioning you on the beach with your wife and son, and everyone’s happy. She’s feeling fulfilled, not just as a mom and a wife, but also as an entrepreneur and contributing to the family.

This is so important in storytelling. The money is going back into the business to launch other products and buy income real estate. We’re creating a legacy and that’s tugging at the heartstrings because a lot of people want to leave a legacy for their children and being on the planet, whether you have kids or not. I don’t know if you consciously did that, but it was valuable for people to hear how to tell a good case story in a way that is intriguing and will promote people to go check out what you’re offering on your course, but also at the same time, learn how to become a master storyteller in a new way. We’re doing two things at once.

I love how you broke that down and that’s amazing. How would you improve that?

Mention her name because it’s more specific, “My wife” and then give her name, and then it will make us do the math in our head. Let us know that eight years ago when you decided to have a child, those little details pull us into a picture in a stronger way. Maybe give a little bit more of a description of maybe a problem she had along the way, and why people need your course in order to make this successful. The biggest mistake people make is they don’t test or they spend too much money or they don’t know the algorithm or they don’t speak the Amazon language. Give us some sense of what she started to do that you helped her not do before she had that success.

We’re on the journey a little bit to go from you have an idea for a product. We don’t know where she gets it from. We don’t know how she tested it. The more we see that there were some challenges. Remember in this case, you’re the Sherpa helping her climb Mount Everest of launching a new product to make money. It’s what we could add into that story to make it even more compelling. As it is, it’s intriguing enough that people are going to go, “I at least want to go to the website.” What’s the best website for people to go to find out more about you as a speaker, and to find out about your book and the course?

I’m going to do a couple of things. One, I’m going to give my email address and this will be my direct email where people could get ahold of me and I will get my website. The website is www.ShaahinCheyenne.com. If anybody’s interested in succeeding on Amazon, reach out to me with an email and that email is [email protected]. I will get back to you. You can also try [email protected].

Shaahin, thank you so much for taking us on this amazing journey of the first 40-something years of your life. I can’t wait to see what the next 40-something is going to bring and the impact it’ll have on the world.

Thank you so much for having me on, John. I’m honored to be on your show.

 

Important Links

• Shaahin Cheyene
• Accelerated Intelligence
• Billion: How I Became the King of the Thrill Pill Cult
• Matcha DNA
• The ONE Thing
• The 80/20 Principle
• Dr. Cialdini – Previous episode
• Pre-Suasion
• Influence
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Accelerated Intelligence, Amazon Accelerator, Amazon Marketing, Amazon Mastery, ecommerce, Herbal Ecstacy