[Top Ecommerce Series] Tips for Building a Profitable Amazon Business With Andrew Wu & Chad Friesen

Andrew Wu is the Brand Director and Co-founder of Hive Invest, a company dedicated to assisting individuals lacking prior e-commerce experience in establishing highly profitable Amazon brands. With a wealth of knowledge spanning two decades, he has honed his expertise in e-commerce, start-up development, real estate branding, marketing, investment strategies, partnership building, and business expansion. Andrew’s track record includes the successful establishment of over six businesses across diverse niches, providing him with the operational experience necessary to drive the growth of Hive Invest. 

Chad Friesen is the CEO and Co-founder of Hive Invest, who transitioned from telecommunication operations to the entrepreneurial world of e-commerce. With an extensive three-decade tenure in business, he brings a wealth of experience encompassing entrepreneurial endeavors and corporate leadership. Chad has played pivotal roles in various industries, engaging in activities such as capital procurement and board of directors participation for emerging ventures. His passion for e-commerce compelled him to establish a lucrative FBA store with Hive, culminating in his integration into the team.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:45] How Hive Invest differs from typical Amazon aggregators and the support it provides to budding brands
• [06:03] Andrew Wu and Chad Friesen discuss the inception of Hive Invest and their e-commerce journey
• [14:21] Hive Invest’s partner selection process and its ideal entrepreneur profile
• [18:30] Hive Invest’s investment and profit-sharing structure
• [22:20] A case study of product success with the Flyte sports backstop net
• [25:08] Common pitfalls in product selection for Amazon businesses and how to avoid them
• [29:34] Amazon tech tools for success
• [32:01] Common mistakes new Amazon sellers make
• [38:25] The influence of personal mentors in business strategy and decision-making

In this episode…

Most people have ambitious e-commerce ideas that they would want to turn into profitable brands on Amazon. However, navigating the challenging terrain of online retail can be daunting. So, could there be a surefire method to navigate these treacherous waters?

Successful e-commerce entrepreneurs Andrew Wu and Chad Friesen delve into the intricacies of starting and scaling an Amazon business. Sharing their unique approach to Amazon entrepreneurship, Andrew and Chad reveal why Hive Invest is more of an incubator than an aggregator, helping to build brands from the ground up. They discuss the importance of proper product selection, marketing investment, and avoiding common pitfalls. By offering their partnership model, they explain how they equip entrepreneurs with the tools, knowledge, and strategies necessary to thrive in the competitive world of online retail.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Andrew Wu and Chad Friesen, Co-founders of Hive Invest, about building profitable Amazon businesses. They discuss the inception of Hive Invest, the support it provides to budding Amazon brands, its investment and profit-sharing structure, and how to avoid the common pitfalls in product selection for Amazon businesses.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Andrew Wu on LinkedIn
• Chad Friesen on LinkedIn
• Hive Investment

Special Mention(s):

• Drew Green on LinkedIn
• Daniel McGill on LinkedIn
• Empire Flippers
• Jungle Scout
• Helium 10
• FeedbackFive
• Amazon Seller Central
• Sellerboard
• Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam Grant
• Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing by Brian Kurtz

Related episode(s):

• “A Business Built on Full Transparency with Roy Krebs Co-Founder of Natural Stacks” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “From Custom Projects to an Ecommerce Platform with Jay Lagarde Founder of Ecomm Engine” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How the Coronavirus Crisis Is Affecting Amazon Sellers” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One Question] Tips to Increase Sales with Chad Rubin Co-Founder of Skubana” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Always give more than you take.”
• “The mindset of an entrepreneur has the understanding of, ‘what I put in, I get back’.” 
• “You want to give consumers more, so always think about how you can help them more.”
• “Product selection is absolutely key, which is why we sweat it so much when we start these stores.”
• “Always be ready to pivot if the market demand just doesn’t show up for your product.”

Action Steps:

1. Vet potential business partners meticulously to ensure long-term success: Reducing risk of partnership conflict improves your chances of building a successful business.
2. Thoroughly research products before investing to find market gaps and avoid excessive competition: Research helps in identifying customer pain points, thus allowing for better product-market fit.
3. Utilize strategic marketing investments to boost product visibility and sales performance: Investing smartly in marketing leverages Amazon’s algorithms and customer acquisition strategies.
4. Focus on creating optimized product listings with high-quality imagery and clear benefit communication: High-quality images and listings improve customer engagement and conversion rates.
5. Continually review and analyze data to make informed decisions about your inventory and product lifecycle: Data-driven decision-making helps avoid long-term inventory costs.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Andrew and Chad of Hive Invest. And before I formally introduce both of you, I always like to point out other episodes. People should check out other podcasts, since this is part of the e-commerce series. There’s a couple really interesting ones. One I did with the founder of Natural Stacks, Roy Krebs. I will say it’s the best intro out of any of my podcasts of all time, over the past decade. You’ll see why if you watch the first five minutes of it. It’s pretty exciting. It’s not because of me. I didn’t do anything, but watch that intro. It’s fascinating. Also Jay Lagarde of Ecomm engine, who runs several softwares in the space, including Feedback Five in the Amazon ecommerce space. I also had James Thompson and Chad Rubin on separately, James and Chad actually started Prosper Show, which is a conference for Amazon sellers. Started with Joe Hanson Etan Weiner, so you can check those episodes out as well. This episode is actually brought to you by Rise25.

And at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Chad and Andrew we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the company to create amazing content and amazing relationships and so they can run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships, and I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you definitely should. If you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

And I’m excited to introduce today’s guests, Andrew Wu and Chad Friesen. They’re co-founders of Hive Invest. And Hive Invest is an Amazon investment company. They utilize investments from investors to create highly profitable Amazon brands and businesses. Now, if you look at their website, hive-invest.com, I’m watching the videos, I guess I would sum it up, Chad and Andrew is, if you have a dream of becoming an Ecommerce millionaire, this could be a shortcut. This could be, I’m not saying you will be. We’re not promising anything here, but this could be a shortcut to do that. So Chad and Andrew, thanks for joining me.

Andrew Wu 3:10 

Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Jeremy.

Chad Friesen 3:11 

Thank you very much. So I’m feeling a little bit of pressure to make the first five minutes of this quite impactful. See if we can’t take that number spot.

Jeremy Weisz 3:21 

Listen, just watch the first five minutes. Nothing can top that one with Roy, and you’ll see why. But talk about Hive Invest and what you do. And for those people listening, there will be a video portion, so I’m going to be sharing my screen, and we’re going to show hive invest, so you can watch the video on YouTube as well. Just talk about hive, invest and what you do.

Andrew Wu 3:45 

Yeah, if I may, start first, go first. Hive essentially, is an Amazon incubator. So unlike most of the other Amazon aggregator where they buy Amazon business, Hive, we focus on starting Amazon businesses with people that starts from revenue, $0 right? So, Hive, we come in and we partner with these Amazon entrepreneur and we started Amazon product, Amazon brand, Amazon store, and build it alongside with them, from sourcing the right product, designing a product, shipping a product to North America and start selling them and increase revenue. And we just really focus on building up the platform, and we need the full support team to help these people start Amazon with a way less time and much less risk, essentially because of all the experience and all the data that we have accumulated over the time, feel free to add in more.

Chad Friesen 4:58 

Absolutely. Thanks, Andrew. If we take a macro look at what Hive Invest is doing, is we really want to empower entrepreneurs, right it’s a theme throughout Hive. It’s right from Chairman of the Board Drew Green through everyone that works here. The focus is really drive that entrepreneurship and really increase the chances of success. That is our aim.

Jeremy Weisz 5:40 

We’ll talk a little bit about how you do it, and some examples, and who’s even a fit to work with you, but how did it come together? You mentioned, right now we’re looking at the site, and there’s several founders. How did this Hive Invest all come together?

Chad Friesen 6:03 

Yeah, Andrew, I’ll let you, I’ll let you lead, and I’ll chime in. How about that?

Andrew Wu 6:07 

Ciao, I’ll let you take this one first.

Chad Friesen 6:10 

Okay, so, so really, the concept of Hive is really, it’s an Amazon FBA business. We help people start Amazon FBA businesses. And that’s something that Daniel McGill, that you’re looking at has been very successful with. I think by age 26 Daniel had two successful exits with Amazon businesses, afforded him the ability to, kind of, in his mid-20s, buy a place in Vancouver, not an easy task these days. So Andrew is a great visionary, able to kind of recognize where businesses are, perhaps able to scale and really how, how best to put them together.

So I’d say from, kind of the bones of the business came from Daniel, the architecture came from Andrew and then we also have, we’re very fortunate to work directly with Drew Green as well. Drew Green is the CEO board, Chair of Indochino. And I mean, it’s, please check them out. It’s an incredible story there and he’s got just such a wealth of experience that we’ve benefited from. And again, his focus as well, is, let’s help create a thriving entrepreneurial community with Canada first, and then expand it from there.

Jeremy Weisz 6:24 

And how did you two meet?

Andrew Wu 7:27 

It was actually a really interesting story. So our company first started. Chad was actually one of the first few partners that joined Hive to start an Amazon brand. And, yeah, then, since then, I think Chad, you should, I actually let you tell the rest of story, since they started the brand with us.

Chad Friesen 8:36 

Yeah. So, I mean, I was really in kind of large corporate as a senior operations in a telecom and when there was an opportunity to kind of expand my wings into kind of an entrepreneurial option that was to start a store with Hive. So actually started myself and a partner started a company called Go Ride, selling basically led helmets. So they’ve got a lake front light back and just what our motivation was, find something that parents are going to feel good about their kids going out and being able to be seen, be safe, and something that they’re actually going to want to wear, right? So that was kind of from a parent’s perspective, that’s what we wanted to do.

And that was, I also knew that I didn’t have the background in E commerce to kind of start that, build that. And so when we found Hive it just made so much sense that companies gone on to do quite well. We’re kind of in, kind of the two quarter million USD in annual sales, so they’ve done a good job by me when, when there was opportunity to kind of join Hive proper, I jumped at it and so I’ve been very fortunate to work with the team and in a leadership capacity as well.

Jeremy Weisz 10:32 

Andrew, what’s your e-commerce journey look like? And with Hive?

Andrew Wu 10:35 

Yeah, I think my E commerce journey definitely can add a really, really good juncture in time in my life. My previous businesses would almost be involved in the real estate marketing. So we were doing a lot of marketing stuff, a lot of real estate projects during the time of Covid. A little bit prior to Covid, we met Daniel, Daniel McGill, so, yeah, this is core. It’s one of the company that we still running, now, doing a lot of real estate development projects. Yeah, so during the Covid time, I met Daniel McGill, and he was telling me how well his Amazon business was doing. He was doing like, well over $100k in sales a month, and then, and then, sold his first business for about $700,000 USD.

I was just very intrigued by how a guy at his age, 26 years old can sell business at that kind of dollar value. So he told me about how he did it and kind of Amazon business. And I’m like, wow. Like, there’s a lot of people who must don’t know this opportunity, but then, with the Amazon platform, that we can help hundreds of entrepreneur people doing this business and make this kind of wealth and able to work anywhere. So that’s when Daniel and I, and then with a few other founders, we start putting Hive together. In the beginning, we started with our own store, and then we started venturing into helping a couple of close friends, including me and Chad in the early stage, like year one, building out the store, and we start to see traction, and we start to get asked by people all around us, like, what are you guys doing?

Like a lot of people who just hate, stop working in their corporate jobs, or they always want to start a business. That’s when we see, you know what, we could expand this. We could build a better team. We would help more people who want to start their entrepreneur journey. And then now we are well over 100 brands in the Hive Partnership Program, and just incredible. And yeah, we’re sending more and more partners every month, and now our internal team are well over 20 people, from designers to our product sourcing team to logistic team to PPC, Amazon advertising team, just seeing incredible growth, and we’re going to keep looking to build our stronger team to support all the future partners who want to join on this venture and get into e-commerce businesses.

Jeremy Weisz 12:09 

I imagine, I’m curious how you curate and how you select the people. Because, obviously this is someone’s like, hey, like, yeah, I want to imagine maybe it’s people in corporate. It’s probably a different walks of life they apply. But you’re investing real time and resources into these people, and you want to make sure every brand you work with and person you work with is successful. It’s kind of like a franchise. I mean, you have to vet these people to make sure it’s going to be successful. And so the first step is they apply. How do you select the right person? What does that profile look like that’s a fit to work with Hive Invest?

Chad Friesen 14:21 

So, what we have is really the benefit of a really strong inner team, right? Michael Tao is the head he’s essentially him and his team are kind of first contact with the potential partners. And he is actually previous experience was with daily Hive, so we thought it wasn’t such a stretch for him to move to Hive, right? We’ve already kind of got the name in its business cards could almost be, would be used, but now he really has our vision, right? We make it a really strong point of this is what we’re building. These are the people that we want to work with, people that understand business is something that you build, right? It takes some time we will absolutely bring in the expertise, and give them every chance of success that we possibly can.

And really, it’s just somebody that the partner has to have that grit right of being able to, okay, if my first product doesn’t absolutely knock it out of the park, maybe I trust these guys to drive down the MOQ, drive down the cost of entry into new products. And let’s find one where let’s find products that are going to work, that they’re going to work well in the store. And that’s really what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people that want to build a business and have it in their DNA to be entrepreneurs.

Jeremy Weisz 16:28 

Do you find typically, it is someone who, I don’t know what you’ve discovered is your ideal profile over the years? Is it someone in corporate that wants to just kind of test the waters is tricky on their own, or is it someone who’s starting their first business? What does that ideal profile typically look like?

Chad Friesen 16:48 

I would say that both have worked. Both have worked right? From the big corporate where this is kind of a sideline, the reason that that works is because, for Hive, we’re full time, right? So we’re in this business, and we, we continue to work it. But I’d say, from a mindset there, the mindset of an already-entrepreneur has that understanding of, “hey, what I put in, I get back,” right? So I mean, I would say, the success has been pretty even. So I can’t pick one over the other.

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