Deep Dive Into Live Selling

I dove much deeper on live selling to learn where the money is (& isn't).

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5 biz ideas for you below.

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After my viral post, I started bidding on ugly shirts in his stream & tracked it all on a spreadsheet. $450/hour!

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After it ended we chatted for an hour, & that’s where I learned all the good stuff.

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THE GOOD STUFF:

‣ He gets the units so cheaply because he buys by the truckload, $20k - $50k at a time.

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‣ He has an 8,000 square foot warehouse in DFW that he stores everything in.

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‣ His average price is closer to $2 per unit, not the $.50 I mentioned in my post. Either he exaggerated when he told me two months ago, or I misremembered. Both are highly likely!

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‣ He sells each unit for $5 - $50, with an occasional $100 - $300 order thrown in. The average sale price is around $13, and he charges $3.99 for shipping.

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‣ He used to only sell apparel but now he buys cheap watches from Ali Baba and sells those as well.

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‣ As I said above, he normally makes $400 - $600 per hour when selling, top line. I kept track on a spreadsheet while he was selling, and it tracks. He even said during the livestream “Chris I bet you’re tracking my sales on a spreadsheet right now aren’t you?” I died.

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‣ He’s starting to dabble in wholesale more and more. So instead of selling 1 shirt at a time to consumers, he’ll sell boxes of shirts at a time to competitors. He thinks wholesale live selling will become more and more popular.

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‣ He’s a member of a bunch of Facebook groups of other WhatNot live sellers and he’ll grow his followers by hosting “raid trains.”

A raid train is when you can click a button in the app to send all your watchers to someone else’s event once yours ends. A group of hosts will do this over and over for hours on end.

It’s the equivalent of a retweet.

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‣ He said there are multiple companies making 7-8 figures per year selling exclusively on WhatNot, including an adult toy brand that makes $50k/day by live selling 24/7!

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‣ WhatNot grows by paying top eBayers to come over to their platform and bring their customers in exchange for $0 fees for a while, similarly to how Twitch grew so fast.

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‣ My biggest takeaway? His followers have a 60 day lifespan, on average. He has around 5,000 followers and he said the ones he had over 60 days ago are no longer around WHATSOEVER. Retention is a MAJOR growth challenge for WhatNot.

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‣ Along with the above, sadly, users often get addicted and their spending gets out of control. After only purchasing that one shirt, I can definitely see how this would be the case.

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It’s fun!

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My heart rate increased, I got nervous and shaky, and all over a $42 ugly shirt that I was literally buying as a joke! Imagine if I actually wanted this stuff?

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Remember in The Other Guys when Will Ferrell says,

"Wait, you learned to dance sarcastically?"

I learned WhatNot buy buying an ugly shirt sarcastically.

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‣ He also told me a story about an NFL player that was friends with the WhatNot founder that got in trouble for scamming buyers.

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He’d sell “unbroken” Pokemon sets and then “break” them while live, but they had actually already been broken, farmed and resealed.

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WhatNot refunded every person that had ever purchased from him (millions) to save face.

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Ok, so is there still money to be made here?

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That’s what you’re thinking now, right? It’s ok, I was thinking the same, but the answer is yes, and here’s 5 different ideas:

1. WhatNot SaaS Ideas

Mr. Beast just launched a YouTube analytics SaaS tool. I think dozens of these could be launched on top of WhatNot, both for buyers and sellers.

Buyers could see what’s trending, and which sellers are undiscovered and have the best prices.

Sellers could tap into what categories or sellers are growing the fastest and go compete with them. Similarly to what Jungle Scout does for Amazon.

You could advertise organically in the many WhatsApp and Facebook groups for WhatNot users.

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2. Sell Directly on WhatNot, Because WhyNot?

Go spend some time in the app, and try to notice what categories WhatNot is pushing you towards. Those are the categories that are trending and/or growing the fastest.

What could you sell on wholesale? What if you simply perused high ticket items on Alibaba and sold those? If I could make 8 figures simply acting as an iPhone parts middleman between store owners and Ali Baba, you can do the same on WhatNot.

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3. Be a Liquidator for the Liquidators (or just sell to them)

Hire a VA to mass DM every WhatNot seller you can in a specific category. Start collecting their emails and building relationships with them. Learn from them. What are their pain points? They’re likely all struggling with the same stuff, and there’s opportunity there.

Maybe you can offer to take any dead inventory off their hands and re-sell it all yourself in a wholesale channel.

Maybe you can create a newsletter for WhatNot sellers. That’d be a high value audience.

Or shoot, maybe you can sell them that SaaS tool mentioned above.

Or, go post to Upwork looking for VAs that have worked for Upwork sellers in the past. Interview them and learn even more alpha that you can monetize.

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4.Think Small

Use Whatnot as a way to teach your kids how to sell, or to unload stuff in your garage. You’ll never learn a platform better than by simply transacting on it.

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5. WhatNot as a service

Liveselling isn’t going away, and Jason has some serious skills at this.

Sometimes he outsources livestreams to his employees, and they literally make HALF as much selling the exact same stuff.

He’s good! You have to have energy and just keep talking and engaging the whole time.

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I told him on the phone he should partner with bigger liquidation companies to train and/or do this for them in exchange for a cut of revenue generated. Or shoot, partner with ANY company that needs to offload crap.

Liquidation is big business, and holding on to dead inventory is a serious problem for companies across a variety of industries.

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Below is the ugly 22 year old 2XL shirt I paid $42 for. 🤣

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This took forever, and you'd normally pay a guru $500 for this in a course, but all I ask for is your follow @mhp_guy and your words of affirmation.