James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes. The first 5,126 didn't work. That's a success rate of two hundredths of one percent.
Frank Sinatra recorded more than a thousand songs and only 209 ever touched a chart. Picasso made around 50,000 works, and well under one percent are considered masterpieces. Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times against 714 home runs, and in each of the five years he led the American League in strikeouts, he also led it in home runs. Same seasons. Same swing.
So here's the question this episode is built on. What if we've been keeping score on the wrong number our whole lives? What if the goal was never the hit rate, and always the attempt rate?
Brian is honest up front that the famous names are the fun part, not the reason. The reason lands around the seventeen-minute mark, when he defines what actually counts as a rep in this business.
A rep is not a lead you looked at. It isn't a product you researched, or a page you've had open for three days. A vetted ASIN plus a vetted source with a known cost gives you a viable ASIN. Clear all three steps of the three-step check and pre-flight inspection and it becomes testable. Buy a small quantity, run the four-week test, and that's the rep. Everything before it is shopping.
Brian puts something on the record here. For five and a half years he taught manual sourcing on this microphone, one product at a time, because he believed the skill was in finding the one. He got off it about eighteen months ago, and not because manual sourcing stopped working. It still works. He got off it because he finally sat down and counted how many ASINs he was touching in a week, and the number was embarrassingly low. "I spent years teaching you to be a better picker," he says, "when I should have been teaching you to be a higher volume tester."
Robin Joy takes the other half. It doesn't take 5,000 ASINs, and it doesn't even take 500. It takes all of them. Every test-worthy lead, every single week, as far as your budget reaches. Decide what you'll spend on testing, then spend all of it, spread across as many ASINs as the money covers. If you've got $400 and forty testable leads, putting all $400 behind your favorite one buys you exactly one rep. Spreading it buys you eight.
They also name the reason people don't. The sellers sitting on thirty or forty testable ASINs who still only test four a month didn't run out of money. They ran out of nerve.
Then the guardrail that makes any of this survivable. The frameworks were never built to make you right. Pre-flight inspection exists so you don't burn a rep on a known bad listing, and capital protection sits inside the three-step check for one reason: being wrong has to be survivable. If you were sure, it wouldn't be a test.
One correction before you overcorrect. Testing is R&D, and R&D is a cost center. Replenishables are the profit center. Test forty this quarter and restock none of them and you're not running a business, you're running a survey.
The quote this week comes from Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Five hundred shots a day was never a basketball statistic. It's a description of somebody's life.
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The New Era Reseller is part of the Modern Builders Network, hosted by Brian and Robin Joy Olson.
Become undeniable.
Oct 15 202649 mins