DESCRIPTION

Shaahin Cheyene is the founder of the brain nutrition startup Accelerate Intelligence (AI). He is also an award-winning business mogul, author, filmmaker, and inventor of Herbal Ecstasy, the nootropic that sparked the (100% legal) Smart Drug Movement. His serial entrepreneurial career has spanned more than 30 years, earning over $350 Million. Shaahin’s Amazon products have outpaced Fortune 500 companies’ sales on the platform, selling millions of units worldwide. Many of these multimillion-dollar companies noticed, which led him to become one of the world’s most sought-after Amazon experts. Shaahin’s Amazon sales approach for start-ups and Fortune 500’s is the same approach he uses to accelerate his own success: a mix of proprietary software, Amazon promotions, copywriting, Amazon ads and social proof. He excels in a variety of niche verticals and have grown brand success for Dr. Breus, Elissa Fisher Harris, Vitagene, KOR Water and many others. In addition to Amazon consulting, Shaahin gives talks on Amazon, Amazon branding, guerilla PR and product development.

TRANSCRIPT

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

amazon, selling, supplement, people, podcast, business, money, distribution, shaheen, ecstasy, product, companies, drugs, bezos, longer, seth green, empower, big, kevin harrington, listeners

SPEAKERS

Shaahin Cheyene

00:00

Welcome to the shark printer podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting edge direct response marketing, a best selling author and the only three time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharpeners, who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

00:40

Why do so many businesses struggle while others seem to explode overnight? Do you wish you had the secret to this type of exponential growth? I've scaled more than 20 businesses to over $100 million. And it's not just luck. In my new book with Mark Tim, mentor to millions you'll learn the repeatable framework I use in all my business ventures for massive success order at Kevin mentor.com and get over $1,000. In bonuses, head to Kevin mentor.com.

01:12

Welcome to the shark printer podcast. This is your co host Seth Green. Today I've got the good fortune to be interviewing Shaahin Shan, the founder of brain nutrition startup accelerate intelligence. He is also an award winning business mogul, author, filmmaker and inventor of herbal ecstasy, the nootropic they spark the 100% legal smart drug movement. So he thanks so much for joining us.

Shaahin Cheyene  01:35

honored to be on with you, sir. All good stuff.

01:38

Well, let's go back in time a little bit your career spanned more than 30 years and earning over a billion dollars, how did you get started,

Shaahin Cheyene  01:45

and now you're making me feel, but I don't really feel. So I started when I was 16. And I started my company. When I was very young, I left home at a very young age, probably around 1615 mesh, and kind of went out there into the world seeking my fame and fortune. And as that story often goes, it did not start well. I started off, you know, couch surfing, you know sleeping on the beach and the back of the old beat up old Lincoln Continental you know taping pages of business books to the seat of the car to the back of the car, and then reading it with a flashlight at night over and over and over again. Until I came up with what was going to be my mastermind my master plan idea, which ended up becoming herbal ecstasy, which was, you know, was a supplement that really shook the entire, you know, the entire supplement industry at that time. Nobody had done anything like that before. So it was an exciting time. Absolutely.

02:57

So how did you go from back of a car to a groundbreaking supplement company?

Shaahin Cheyene  03:04

That's a really good question. So that that gets into a little bit of a longer story. But I was being mentored by someone who, you know, I talked about this in my book who became a real guide and sort of like a North Star to me at that time. And at that time, the electronic music music scene, you know, the rave scene had just really taken off the and I had gotten involved in the electronic music scene, I'd been going to these waves, I was never much of a party or I didn't really have any money. But I realized that I could go into these clubs late at night, sometimes I would just crash behind the speakers for two, three hours. You know, it was this very drone repetitive music. And you know, I could make some friends meet some people it was it was a decent place for me to be it was very safe place from so I started doing that. And as I started learning about the business of it, I started throwing some some of these actual rates. And what I learned was, was that the people who were throwing the Braves weren't making money, the DJs who almost never got paid, we're making money. And there was just one group of people who was making money.

04:24

Can you guess who that is? Is it the people selling drugs? very astute observations.

Shaahin Cheyene  04:29

So you are correct. So it was the people who were selling the drugs. Now I never did any of those kinds of drugs in those days. And I sat around just kind of watching the transactions, you know, and I even notice sometimes that the people dealing the drugs would actually just give some money to the promoters just to keep the doors open so that they can continue doing what they were doing. So it was you know, funnel of sorts for them, you know, at some time in the early to mid 90s Something happened. And that was that the supply of the most popular party drug ever of all time designer, drug ecstasy, dried up ecstasy at first, which was legal and was a party drug in the 80s. And then in the 90s, was made illegal. Probably not for very good reason. But it was and what happened was the supply of it, which is it's a, it's a very complex drug for, for them to make dried up. So there was no more at the clubs. And these, you know, the drug dealer from basically freaking out, they were like, what are we gonna do, there was all kinds of bad stuff floating around there. It was, it was not a positive scene, I thought to myself, What if there was a way where we could use natural ingredients, herbs, you know, plants stuff, ingredients and supplements, and make something that people could have fun on, but wouldn't hurt them and wouldn't be illegal. And then it was born, I was a teenage kid, I had no idea what I was doing, you know, the first batch we we literally mixed up in a bathtub, you know, my, my girlfriend's house, you know, and I would like, you know, sneaking because the dad didn't know I was there. And we would just mix it up. And then you know, finally we moved on to I outsource to a little herbalist, Chinese man in Chinatown, at least Chinatown. And he started putting it together, until finally we got a formula that started working, and it worked really well. And then I needed to have the distribution, which was the key to this whole thing. So I walked into one of these clubs that I would frequent one of these raves, and notice, you know, all the drug dealers, their their supply completely gone, and them in a completely crap state of mind. And you know, when you're young, and you know, in your teens, and you got nothing to lose, I think you know, this that you're fearless, yes. You got nothing to lose. So I walked up to these guys, and I said, guys sell this. And they looked at me, like, I was crazy. And they said, What the hell is it? And I went through explaining to them, Hey, you know, it's an all natural high. The, you know, it's completely legal. And they said, you know, well, why do we want to sell this? We've got real drugs. And I said, Well, you don't actually have good real drugs anymore. And, you know, you could go to jail. And so most of them said, No, one guy said yes. And he happened to be one of the biggest dealers at the time. And he took the entire backpack. He came back with a water cast that everybody took it. Everybody tried it, it was the most amazing experience they ever had, how can I get more, and that became my first distributor there. And it grew, it expanded to 10 distributors to 50 distributors to 5000 distributors. And within a very short clip of months, we were everywhere. We were being sold in urban outfitters and 711. We were being sold a Tower Records. I don't know if you do remember Tower Records. Right. So Tower Records was selling our product we were selling at GNC we were selling it at every place under the sun. Plus, we were doing a really swift business, through the rave the club scene, it was everywhere, you could not go anywhere where you wouldn't see it. And we were making the millions of dollars a day, I spent most of my 18th birthday, you know, fast forward a couple years. Basically traveling all over the world doing interviews on TV, sort of defending the virtues of having a safe legal alternative.

08:41

That is an absolute incredible story. I'm sure the longer version is going in the book on talk about I mean, you have products on Amazon that have outpaced fortune 500 companies sales, talk a little bit about how that's changed in terms of going from selling bricks and mortar retail to now selling that and a whole lot more online.

Shaahin Cheyene  09:02

Yeah, great question. So that's actually a great lead in where that where that takes us was one of the biggest lessons I learned one of the fundamental pieces of value is that it's not about the product. It's about the distribution. And the most amazing thing that happened I think in the last 20 years is that a little guy and I mean little by stature but but definitely not by capacity. Jeff Bezos who came from the the world of venture capital working for you know, one of the biggest finance ears had access to cheap capital that he took to build this this massive company opened it up to third party sellers. And I was long gone out of the the ecstasy world you know, I sold that we created a billion dollars in revenue. It was a fast and and quick crazy ride in those days. And, you know, I launched hundreds of companies I worked for Big Pharma, I worked for all types of different industries. And then I remember one one night, one evening, I had a brain supplement that we sell, and thinking about how I'm going to sell this and remembering the lessons from the herbal ecstasy time, which is it's all about distribution going, how am I going to sell this, and Bezos opens up the platform to third party sellers. And we were one of the first sellers of supplements on the Amazon platform, and we put the supplement on there very high and brain supplements. So you know, it was like 120 bucks at the time. And I just listed it on there. I was like, yeah, you know what we've done eBay, let's put it on this thing. The next morning, we woke up to over 1000 orders at $120, a piece going, Oh, my God, Mind blown. And then Bezos goes one further, he is like, we've brought in the head of Walmart, which is what he did the head of Walmart's fulfillment and packing and distribution, which was the piece that Amazon had not figured out yet how to handle the fulfillment to given him a blank check to set up these fulfillment centers. And that's how FBA was born, where Amazon will now take that part out of the equation for us sellers, and pick pack ship at a ridiculous discount your goods for you. So the ability for us to sell on the world's largest platform, Amazon, mixed with the the the necessity for Amazon to pack and ship it and no longer than necessary that the necessity for us to ship on on Amazon led to this huge windfall of profits. And the ability for us as a seller to focus on what we do best, creating awesome products, and selling it on the platform, and not having to worry about pick, pack and ship, all the stuff that comes with customer service, they are handling all of it. And especially in the early days. Now, when I teach my course. And for my students, it's a little bit more complex, which is why people do need a mastermind now in order for this to happen. But before it was really easy, Amazon was giving free eyeballs, they were spending millions and millions of dollars on Google ads and driving traffic to these products. So we launched supplements, we launched teas, which To this day, we have the best selling brand of green tea on Amazon, we launched furniture, home goods, anything that you could imagine. And then what happened was that other companies started coming to us because Amazon became the great equalizer. And I don't mean this by them being an equalizer as giving the consumer any advantage which which they do it's it's a great consumer experience. I'm sure you know, I would imagine you buy things from Amazon. Yeah,

13:10

every single day.

Shaahin Cheyene  13:12

We all do, right? It's that happy time when those packages end up at our doors. But it became the great equalizer from the standpoint of a allowing a small seller like me or you to be able to compete with these massive Goliath publicly held companies, it no longer matter that you were the dominant brand. Because Amazon enables you to be able to as a seller, as somebody who's starting a business, you could, you could have absolutely no experience in selling online, you could have a product that's okay, but not great. And if you know how to speak the language of the consumer tell the story. The way the consumer who buys on Amazon buys to show them the product the way they search. You can beat out these big brands and we've done it repeatedly. We've done it with soap, we've done it with home goods, kitchen goods, clean supplies, you name it. And so Amazon becomes this great equalizer and it is super exciting. So now I take all those lessons that I learned from the supplement business from the curb Lexie business and now we empower people to start their Amazon businesses and basically do what I did back in the day, but with a lot less friction.

14:29

Oh absolutely incredible journey I'm sure yet what inspired you to start I know you got reached out to by other companies and other sellers. Why did you decide to share some of your secret sauce and and and help other people back in the 90s I

Shaahin Cheyene  14:45

created over a billion dollars in revenue it's well documented if any of your listeners want to search me You guys can isn't like I know now like I'm sure you hear to a lot of these like you know there's a lot of internet gurus and everyone's a millionaire everyone drives Lambo every once in a private jet, right? If you dig a little deeper, you'll see that the jet was 20 minute Instagram rental for 500 bucks. The lambos were rented off Turo. And the big house was a 15 minute video rental. So in my past, I think one of the things that sets me apart is that I actually live that lifestyle, I actually have the jets and the yachts and all that stuff. So back in the day, you know, and I lost it many times over and rebuilt it many times over. And the latest iteration is this on on Amazon. But in order to get to that level, people need guidance, they need mentorship, which is where I come in, I have enough money, now I have enough resources, right? I'm not chasing that kind of success. What empowers me is empowering other entrepreneurs. What I love to see I have people who are part of my mastermind, who are part of my mastery course, who are 16 years old, 16 year old kids that are starting these Amazon businesses, and absolutely crushing it, if you saw what they were doing, you would not believe that these kids are 16 years old. I've got people that are retired 65 year old guys who couldn't get a job who are now selling on Amazon. And, you know, Seth before, what made me feel really great, and it still does today is walking into a brick and mortar store. And seeing somebody picking up a product that I've produced from nothing that I've ideated created, produced, using it and enjoying it, it's like the best feeling in the world. And I've done that millions of times over, I've sold millions of products like that. But now as I'm in my 40s, you know, I'm 46 now, Family Guide kid, a wife, that whole thing, you know, my lifestyle is mostly travel oriented, or was, you know, pre COVID, it really comes down to, for me a to sharing my story. But why is because I enjoy empowering other people to succeed. And the path to that. Now, the quickest path, I believe, is diversification with four pillars, and the main pillar being having some kind of online e commerce, predictable, recurring revenue stream. And that's what Amazon offers, which is why I'm so excited about that. We've got three other pillars, you know, we've got real estate, which I talked to people about growing cash flow, real estate, having some money in the market, and having some money and in a different leg, which we you know, talk about in my in my course into my students, but but ultimately, you got to have those foundations. And when you have those foundations, creating those recurring revenue streams, where it's predictable, a lot of times it's not sexy, something that you can count on, over and over and over again, then you can build and, and sky's the limit. And that's what I like to see I like to see people doing that

18:17

that is fantastic. I find a lot of times we learn more from other people's adversity than we do from just trying to emulate their success. So save our listeners some time and money because you've been on the roller coaster ups and downs of a billion dollars in more in transactions. What are some of the biggest challenges you've had to overcome? And what do you learn from them?

Shaahin Cheyene  18:40

There's a lot of challenges when you're 16 years old, and starting a company. So when I when I first started my company, I think the the biggest lesson that I had, again, was that you got to focus on distribution, that back one step, the riches are in the niches I say that often. You never want to go into a red ocean, you want to find a blue ocean. So you want to find a market. You want to dominate that market. You want to be the big fish in the small pond initially. Moving on from there. The way you win is through distribution. It's all about distribution, right? I'm sure you've seen some some films that you've watched, and I've gone man, I can't believe I just spent two hours watching this two hours of my life gone. Yeah. But those movies made it out. And they made money. Why? Because the distribution, right? somebody knew somebody and somehow got out. Imagine says how many great movies, fantastic movies, great stories, all that stuff that never gets seen. The only thing that sets those two apart is distribution. So start with distribution. I didn't do that with herbal ecstasy in the initial phases. I created a product and I went out there and I found the distribution but The second I learned about the the magic and the glory of having other people selling your thing for you was when it really skyrocketed. And that's, that's what happened that now what I teach my students is start with distribution, find out what the market needs, and feed it that rather than creating a product, and going out there and trying to find a market for what you're selling, that's a really long road. And yeah, okay, you can, you know, throw the throw the throw the little, you know, ball on the table, and it might land on double green, and then again, it might land on red, and you pick the black, not the best way to go, we like to now the way we do things is with greater certainty, we use analytic tools, and there's a lot of great ones that I talked about, and I'm happy to share them with your listeners, if they ever, if anybody wants to reach out, you know, we use analytic tools to spy on the market, we find out what the competitors are selling, what's selling in every marketplace, what the hottest products are, what the trends are. And then we go in, and we create products to meet that market demand. And when you do that, you have sales from day one, when you start selling, rather than having to go through the long slog of having to educate the consumer about why your product is better than other products. I say leave that to the big fortune 50, fortune 500 companies, a lot of which are my clients who don't mind spending that money on education and content and all that. And for anybody who wants to make money now today, on the Amazon platform, and in e commerce in general, it doesn't matter what you're doing Shopify, eBay, whatever, Walmart, any of those platforms, what you have to do is you have to find out what the information is that the market needs. My friend and mentor Wayne always says that there's three steps. You've got knowledge, courage, and action to any strategy. He's a master strategist, who this guy's made hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of his lifetime, taking distressed companies and turning them into mega companies. And one of the things I learned from him was that you need knowledge. The first thing you need is information, how do we get knowledge, right, you can borrow it, you can buy it, you can steal it, there are lots of different ways you can get knowledge, right? So you got to get that knowledge, once you have that knowledge, that information. So in this case, it could be how we're going to sell into a specific marketplace of what we're going to sell what the market needs. You have that information if you knew Seth, that everybody needed a special microphone for podcasting. And this was the best one, you go out again, they bite in a second, if it had this feature, you go out and buy 10,000 of them today, because you knew you could sell it. You had that knowledge, right?

22:53

Yes.

Shaahin Cheyene  22:54

So the knowledge takes us to the second phase, which I talked about all this in my book, which is courage, it gives you courage, right? If I said, Come jump out of a plane, you'd be like, what? Geez, you know, I think like, I don't know, like, you're scared, you don't have the courage. If you had taken a month long course, on skydiving and you knew everything about how to pull the price, it's that jump out the plane, you'd be like, let's go. But here we go. This is what we do. Because you have the only difference is, is having the knowledge, the knowledge gives you that courage to jump. And once you have the knowledge you nothing happens until you take that first step. And that's action. And these are the three keys the fundamentals of what we do now, what we teach to our students, in order to get them to empower themselves and create these Predictable Revenue Streams on Amazon.

23:47

Awesome. What is the book and where can our listeners go to get a copy?

Shaahin Cheyene  23:51

So I have a podcast, you can look me up on any of the usual podcast places. There's two podcasts actually. So one is called hack and Grow Rich, and you can just look up my name Shaheen Shan the second podcast is the herbal XC story. And it's a it's a much more produced, it's almost like a mini feature film. And that one is called billion. How I became king of the thrill kill Kult. And that's kind of the podcast that goes along with my book that's coming out. And you know, Seth, for any of your listeners, if anybody is interested. I'm going to be offering up our one hour Amazon mastery course it's normally 200 bucks. I'll just let them have it for free. If anybody wants to reach out to me by email. Give up.

24:41

Yeah, that would be fantastic.

Shaahin Cheyene  24:43

Yeah. Okay. So my email is going to be de ARKZ e. s. s@gmail.com. That's dark. zess@gmail.com. So if anybody wants to reach out to me or come to my website Shaahin Shan calm You can reach out to me that way. I'm happy to give you guys because you're a listener to shark shark Rob printer is how we pronounce our Turner shark.

25:10

Shark printer. Okay,

Shaahin Cheyene  25:11

love it. Great man. So I just mentioned shark printer and we will give you a code where you can get the one hour Amazon mastery course for free. Just want to try to empower you guys to start your online businesses and succeed.

25:25

All right, well, that is a fantastic offer. We will make sure to take you up on it. This has been Seth Green for short. Minerva Shaahin Jian Cheyene. Thank you so much for joining us. It's so much fun honor to be on bud. Thanks, everybody for watching. You're listening. We'll see you next time. Do you need money to fund your idea, product or service? Are you ready to take your business to the next level but need capital to get it done? Kevin Harrington has heard more than 50,000 pitches and knows how to help you make the perfect pitch to get the funding for your entrepreneurial dream. He's distilled the process down in his perfect pitch cheat sheet and it's yours for free. Just text pitch to him right now at 727-888-2100 text pitch 272782100 right now and claim your free perfect pitch cheat sheet text pitch to seven to 7888 to 100 to start funding your dream today.

26:18

This show has been produced by market domination LLC. To discover how you can have your own show completely done for you and turn it into a real published book and become the authority in your marketplace. Go To www dot market domination llc.com slash podcast offer.

Shaahin’s Links, audio podcast, and more:

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/ShaahinCheyene

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shaahincheyene/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/shaahincheyene

Twitter - https://twitter.com/shaahincheyene

Seth Greene’s Links, audio podcast, and more:

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/user/APMFunnel

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/market_domination_llc/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MarketDominationLLC

Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/company/market-domination-llc/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/mktdominationus

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