🤦‍♂️ The Invite I’ll Regret Forever

What you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:

• 🤦‍♂️ The Invite I’ll Regret Forever… [True Story]

• ✅ How to Become a Top Amazon Best Seller

• 🤝 The US TikTok Deal is Officially Done

• ⚒️ Stop AI From Sounding Like AI… [Step-By-Step Guide]

• 🔥 This is Why Most Paid Communities SUCK...

🔥 Hey Beardos, I’ve got another BIG webinar happening Jan 29th.

 AEO Secrets: How to Be "The Answer" in the New AI Shopping Era

You'll learn:

• How AI shopping is creating a brand new marketplace (and how to be there)

• The fundamental shift from "ranking" to "being cited"

• How to optimize for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Amazon Rufus

• The BRAIN Framework for AI visibility

And much more…

🚀 Sign up here

🤦‍♂️ The Invite I’ll Regret Forever… [TRUE STORY] 

Back in the 1980s, I did some work for The Alan Parsons Project.

They were coming through Toronto, and as part of the deal, they handed me two access passes.

Not just tickets but all access passes.

Here’s where it gets better.

They were touring with Yes, one of the biggest bands of the 70s.

As soon as I heard that, I knew exactly who I had to bring with me.

My graphic designer, Tom.

He was also a drummer and a massive Yes fan.

Especially their drummer, Bill Bruford.

So we head to the concert and it was one of those nights where you don’t want it to end.

After the crowd cleared out, we went backstage.

Just the bands, crew, and a handful of people.

At some point, a couple of the band members said they were heading out for a drink and asked if we wanted to join them.

I was in.

Tom politely declined.

He said he had some work to do.

I’ve learned from my past not to push invites, everyone has their reasons to decline.

It was one of those nights I’ll remember forever.

The next day, Tom was back in the office.

I walked over and said, “Why didn’t you come out with us last night?”

He said, “Ah, I just had a lot of work.”

I looked at him and said, “You passed on drinks with your idol?”

He frowned “What are you talking about?”

I said, “The guy who asked us… That was Bill Bruford.”

I’ll never forget the look on his face.

His mouth literally dropped open.

He had no idea.

I didn’t rub it in but to this day, that night still sticks with me.

Business Lesson

In business, the person offering help, partnership, or advice might not look like the opportunity they are.

If you hesitate too long or overthink it, the moment passes.

Sometimes the best move is simply saying yes, especially when you’re already in the room.

— Norm

✅ How to Become a Top Amazon Best Seller: My Lessons From 600+ Seller Interviews

Kelsey Farrar interviewed me for a Startup Club article on the top 10 lessons I learned from hosting 600+ episodes of Lunch With Norm.

Below are 6 (out of 10) of those lessons. Read the full article for the complete list and deeper breakdown. Enjoy.

Lesson 1: Know Your Numbers Like Your Business Depends on It 

The best sellers are obsessed with their numbers. 

Some sellers best revenue screenshots were actually their worst profit months.

The sellers Norm respected most accounted for everything that quietly chews through profit:

• Landed cost (NOT just product cost)

• Inbound shipping and prep fees

• PPC spend, including the messy bits like branded defense and auto campaigns

Lesson 2: Build Systems

Amazon rewards systems.

Rather than waking up and asking, “What do I feel like working on today?” they had structured rhythms:

• Account health and listing status checks every week

• Recurring inventory forecasting and purchase-order cycles

• SOPs for new product setups, keyword research, and launch strategies

The guests who had made the transition from seven to eight figures always had the same story to tell: until they began documenting, everything was chaotic.

They went from “I just do it myself because it’s faster” to:

• SOPs for the creation and updating of listings

• SOPs for coordinating with suppliers

• SOPs for reconciliations, reimbursements, and fee audits

Lesson 3: Own Your Customer

There were always vendors who were enthusiastic about their “hero product.” One SKU that was going to revolutionize everything. Sometimes it did, at least for a short while.

The most resilient guests asked, “What kind of brand am I building, and how wide can this logically grow?”

Norm’s guests who did this well:

• Invested in post-purchase experience: clear instructions, helpful inserts, QR codes pointing to guides or videos

• Built communities off Amazon, email lists, social groups, content hubs

• Treated every customer as if they were a repeat customer, rather than a one-time sale

Lesson 4: Make the Customer Your Editor-in-Chief

Winning sellers treated reviews and returns as data. Losers treated them as insults.

Winners would:

• Read reviews in groups to search for recurring phrases.

• Categorize complaints by theme: quality, size, expectations, instructions, packaging.

• Ask, “What is the customer actually telling us?”

Lesson 4 : Converting Reviews and Returns into a Product Roadmap

Norm observed smart sellers use negative feedback as free advice:

• A product with repeated “smaller than expected” reviews: they added comparison photos, clear dimensions, and a size guide. Returns decreased.

• A product with assembly complaints: adding a QR code to a simple video tutorial not only reduced returns but also increased reviews with “easy to put together.”

Lesson 5: Every Seller Pays The “Amazon Tax” (But How Much is Up to You)

At first, in the early days of the Amazon gold rush, these strategies were effective. Many guests confessed that they had employed aggressive giveaway tactics, review groups, and manipulative launch strategies. However, the price tag was eventually due.

Norm began referring to these shortcuts and a whole series of avoidable mistakes as the “Amazon tax.” Either way, everyone pays to learn.

Lesson 6: The $10 / $100 / $1,000 / $10,000 Work Framework

This was one of the most frequently mentioned frameworks that sellers should alwayas distinguish:

$10 tasks:

• Repetitive admin

• Basic customer messages

• Routine listing uploads

$100 tasks:

• SOPs and timelines management

• Inventory ordering and vendor communication

• Project management

$1,000 tasks:

• PPC and media specialists

• Conversion-driven creative

• External traffic setups

$10,000 tasks (owner-level):

• Brand vision and positioning

• Big partnerships and distribution agreements

• Expansion decisions and capital allocation

If Norm’s eight-figure guests found themselves doing $10 or $100 tasks on a consistent basis, they considered it a red flag.

P.S. There was a ton of info I had to cut to keep this email small enough to send, don’t miss out on the last 4 lessons (and the other lessons in more detail)

🚀 Read more here

🤝 The US TikTok Deal is Offically Done…

TikTok just closed a deal to spin off parts of its U.S. operations into a new joint venture with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX stepping in as managing investors.

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, retains just under a 20% stake, which technically satisfies the U.S. government’s demand for foreign ownership divestment under the 2024 “sell-or-ban” law.

While Oracle and the others will oversee data security, the real money, e-commerce, ads, and marketing stays with ByteDance.

That means the revenue engine remains under Chinese control.

So what changed?

Not much operationally, except now TikTok can say it played ball with U.S. regulators.

The board is mostly American, led by longtime TikTok exec Adam Presser and includes CEO Shou Chew.

Apps like CapCut and Lemon8 are also covered by the new structure.

This deal was a year in the making.

Days after the deal was announced, TikTok users across the U.S. were hit with one of the worst outages in recent memory.

Zero views.

Videos stuck in review.

Log-in failures.

For You Pages reset like new accounts.

Users flooded Reddit and X to report endless repetition of irrelevant content, random influencer clips, old liked videos resurfacing, and a feed that seemed algorithmically broken.

All of this came as TikTok started retraining its recommendation engine using American data, hosted on Oracle’s infrastructure.

🔥 Read more here

🌎 Where in the World is The Beard Guy?

🔥 This is Why Most Paid Communities Suck...

Here are my favorite tips from this episode!

1. Attention only becomes valuable when it is converted into trust

Content creates attention, but only consistent credibility, experience, and authenticity convert that attention into long-term monetization leverage. Stop treating content as a traffic channel and start treating it as a trust-building engine that unlocks multiple monetization paths such as subscriptions, communities, and agencies.

2. Communities outperform audiences because they reduce creator dependency risk

A key distinction is that an audience stops when the creator stops publishing, while a community continues to generate interaction without the creator’s presence. The transcript highlights the operational risk of being the only voice driving engagement. Communities create shared ownership of conversation, reducing burnout and scaling limitations.

3. Strong communities are built through vetting

Jordan’s success came from rejecting more applicants than it accepted, ensuring cultural alignment and high contribution standards. Sellers building paid communities should prioritize member quality over member count, because the wrong members degrade trust, engagement, and perceived value faster than slow growth ever will.

🔥 Watch the full episode here

Find this episode of Marketing Misfits on YouTube and anywhere you listen to podcasts

And that’s it, Beardos.

See you next Monday!

- Norm

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