Episode 14: “Forging A Lifestyle" with The Richest Kids In Maine (#ThisIsMyEra the Podcast)
Lots of guests on the #ThisIsMyEra podcast started making it their era at a young age, but Jonny and Jeremiah – also known as the Richest Kids in Maine – are truly remarkable for having built a million dollar eCommerce business at the ages of just 21 and 22. They taught themselves the ropes of using Amazon as a platform to sell their products and, through trial and error, navigated the learning curve and massively scaled their brand within a single year.
In this episode, the Richest Kids in Maine join the #TIME podcast to share their insights on launching an Amazon-based brand, cultivating a customer base, and prioritizing family and community. They provide a clear roadmap for anyone wanting to give an Amazon business a try, either as a main business or as a side hustle. The central takeaways they offer are applicable in nearly every area of life, and show just how many lessons entrepreneurship can teach us that can make us better people.
Keep a laser focus on your next step.
Johnny and Jeremiah achieved success on Amazon by carefully fine-tuning every product they launched one at a time, rather than launching a whole product line all at once. In a super competitive market, it was essential that their products stood out from their competitors’ products based on their quality.
On Amazon, quality means good reviews, and good reviews mean higher search placement and more customers. They earned these reviews the hard way, by carefully listening to their customers’ feedback and needs, and modifying their products until they exactly fit what their customers wanted.
What worked well for them in the eCommerce space can be replicated in the pursuit of any goal. Taking on too much at one time divides your focus, keeping you from diving deep into a single pursuit and investing the time it takes. Being open to feedback and being willing to change mid-course are essential skills that will allow you to learn by doing and continually improve.
The truest measure of success isn’t monetary.
In this podcast, Kuda asks the Richest Kids in Maine how it felt when they realized that their business had hit a million dollars in revenue. Their answer is surprising: it didn’t really matter to them. They didn’t throw a party or celebrate that milestone, or any other milestone. For them, a bigger measure of success was seeing how their monetary gains translated into real-world lifestyle change, and how they were able to share their new wealth with family and friends. This meant taking their families to Hawaii and Thailand and investing in their friends’ businesses… and who wouldn’t feel successful after doing that?
You don’t have to be super serious to be an entrepreneur.
The Richest Kids in Maine have built a massively successful business from the ground up, and they’ve done it while staying true to their personalities and without creating a corporate environment. Their greatest motivation was pursuing a flexible lifestyle where they owned their own time, so it makes sense that creating a suit-and-tie office environment wasn’t one of their goals!
They prove that a successful business doesn’t have to fit a corporate mold...or any mold, for that matter. It can reflect your individual priorities and still be massively successful, even if that means putting family and quality of your personal life over the monetary bottom line.
TAKE MASSIVE ACTION NOW
Learn a new skill.
Johnny and Jeremiah are open about the challenges they had to overcome to become successful on Amazon. Not only was there a huge learning curve to enter the market, but each step in scaling their business meant that they had to master new skills. Being persistent and putting in the necessary time to develop these skills allowed the duo to eventually reap huge rewards.
What’s a skill that would allow you to scale your business, streamline a process, or help you achieve a goal? Take time to learn it, whether that means enrolling in an online course, reading a book, or learning from YouTube. The internet is full of resources for learning new things, and often it costs nothing but time. Map out steps towards learning it using the SMART method and your 90 Day Planner.
2) Work on capturing more of your market share.
Depending on your personal goals, this could be literal or figurative. Jeremiah and Johnny have achieved success by carefully perfecting a single product and then offering variations of that product to appeal to a wider customer base. How can you replicate this strategy? That could mean expanding your product line or repackaging your message so that it targets a different niche.
There’s likely a group of customers out there that have a problem you can easily solve with the skills, product, or message you’ve already developed. Explore how you can grow by leveraging the hard work you’ve already accomplished.
Episode Outline:
00:45: Introduction
2:00: How Johnny and Jeremiah met.
3:00: How they got their start in eCommerce.
4:30: Building their business, Tribe Fitness, from the ground up.
6:00: Navigating a learning curve as they scaled their business.
7:30: Why listening to the customer is essential for success on Amazon.
9:30: How delayed gratification can mean greater success.
11:30 Tribe Fitness’s product lineup, and cultivating a customer base.
15:30: Why Johnny and Jeremiah launch one product at a time.
18:30: The Richest Kids in Maine’s advice to listeners - and how business lessons translate into life lessons.
20:30 Why communication is key when working with a partner.
21:00 What happened when they realized they had hit a million dollar business.
23:15 Their biggest achievement so far.
24:20 The importance of a positive outlook.
26:30 How Johnny and Jeremiah are diversifying their wealth.
28:15 How they’re making it their era.
31:15 The advice they would give their 16-year old self (even though it was just a few years ago.)
32:45 Alexander Star and Kuda discuss their biggest takeaways from this interview.
Episode Links:
Shop Tribe Fitness: tribefitness.co
Use the promo code SAVE30 for 30% off!
You can also shop Tribe Fitness on Amazon.
Connect with #ThisIsMyEra on Facebook (@thisismyeraofficial)
Connect with #ThisIsMyEra on Instagram (@thisismyeraofficial)
Join the conversation across all platforms with the hashtag #ThisIsMyEra
Pull quotes:
“Keep the quality up, and everything will fall into place.”
“You don’t claim #ThisIsMyEra just so you can do everything for yourself… you do it so you can serve other people.”
