Fight The Fake Amazon Reviews To Save Your Online Reputation and Make A LOT More Money

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Hello, my friend and welcome to 714th episode of the sales
podcast. I'm going to shave for the sales
was for your host today. We have a crazy man Shane Parker
all the way from Reno. He has created a company called
Trace fuse dot AI and we get into his story, how he founded
it, how long it took him and it took years.
You know, we saw an opportunity.He was determined, he was

(00:22):
driven, a bit obsessed and others called him a little
crazy. You know, he probably is more
than a little crazy. So we had some fun talking about
streaking, drinking Irish, a fewother things.
You have to wait and watch the whole thing to get into it.
But smart guy and focus on the Amazon space.

(00:45):
But came from the marketing consulting world.
But he saw a need, you know, andit took a while to fill it.
But he is filling a big need anda big way.
He is a big fish in a small pond.
So you'll be inspired by his determination, his vision and
how he has modified his offer toexpand his reach, get more

(01:06):
market share, serve smaller clients viably, right?
Because it's always the give andtake.
You know, you want to help the little guy, but they have less
money. They take a lot of time to take
as much time as a big guy, sometimes more.
So how do you, how do you scale?So he started with the big guys,
proved it, proved his his model and modified his offering for
everybody so he can help small and large and he's sweet in the

(01:29):
pot with some risk reversals andongoing benefits.
So, you know, you get ideas fromthis that you can apply to your
own business. All right, so that's what we get
into Shane Barker. And if you need that kind of
help, you know, every Tuesday I'm on live, live call with the
inner circle throwing in a lot of benefits of ongoing support
as well. You get some, some physical

(01:50):
items, you get some courses, butyou know, you can post in the
group every day and I am online every day.
So, you know, for a few dollars a day, if you want help, you can
join weekly, you can join quarterly, you can join
annually, but you're going to grow if you show up and listen
and apply yourself. OK, so check out the inner
circle. I'll link to it in the in the

(02:12):
show notes. Then you go to wshaffer.com and
it's up there in the top. Avail yourself, right?
Don't work alone, especially theeconomy is shifting right now
and we get into a recession or atough time or whatever.
Being alone is not ideal. It's never really ideal, right?
It's certainly not recommended in tough times because that's

(02:34):
when opportunities avail themselves.
It's when they they come around and during the chaos.
But you may need some outside fresh eyes, fresh perspective to
help you see the opportunity in your field.
So you know, like I said, you can join for a week at a time.
Come kick the tires and I'll prove myself and I'll help you
grow. All right, So check out the

(02:56):
inner circle and then come back and listen to this episode with
Shane. Shane Barker, founder of Trace
Fuse, all the way from Reno, NV.Man, welcome to the sales
podcast. How the heck are you I'm?
Doing awesome man. Doing awesome.
How are you doing? Good.
But I will ask the questions here.
OK, Don't be flipping the script, you know, I've got to
maintain positioning, got to keep you in the rails, you know,
there's boundaries here, there'sborders, there's rules, there's

(03:18):
guidelines I heard. About that, yeah, I'll make sure
to respect every single one of them.
Don't worry, I promise you that.I I know you've been briefed.
My people talk to your people. You, you sign the NDAI mean you,
I mean, come on now. Don't be, don't be.
I don't want to edit this already, OK?
Yeah. You're, you're going to spend a
little bit extra editing little bit of time on accident on this
one. I promise you that.
Damn. It cut cut just never mind.

(03:43):
Oh my gosh. So trace fuse dot AI, man, are
you are you one of these AI Bros?
AI is everywhere. I don't think it's going to last
man. I kind of like the Internet.
I think it's just a fad. I think that's that's that might
come back to bite you eventually, but I think it's
good to put out these things. It's Speaking of edit, Jesus,
let's edit that. Let's go ahead.

(04:04):
And I don't know who your editoris, but let's get rid of that
first part. That's me, so it's staying so.
It's everything I say. I could barely hit record and
stop. So look, I mean, that's it, man.
That's it. You got to know your super
powers. I mean, that's important.
Yeah. I mean, it's it's funny.
So I am not like, I mean I didn't go get like the AI tattoo
or anything like we're you know,I mean, maybe one day I will.
I mean, it's it's on the hey there.

(04:26):
Oh yeah, look at that. AI Bros.
Yeah, I mean, I'd get one if yougot one, except when I get
tattoos. It's a different situation,
which we don't have enough time on the podcast.
I got only one have one literally one tattoo and I
passed out. It was an answer to him.
Whole nother conversation, wholedifferent podcast.
In fact, I think I think the statue of limitations has
already passed. So I think we're good.
I could probably tell you some of the story, but anyways,

(04:47):
nobody. I was duct taped to a bar in
Korea, so I mean, we could tradesome stories.
Yeah, yeah, man. What was her name?
Sorry. Unfortunately, there were no
women involved. So you're you're that's a
serious story. I could tell by that reaction.
Mine was serious too, but I think we were in different
situations. I was paying for pain and you
might have been trying to get out of it.
Is it kind of what I'm? I tried three times to get a

(05:08):
tattoo, but the needles kept breaking on the steel.
They paid me to leave. They're.
Like, listen, we don't, we have no more needles.
So just we can just we'll give you cash to leave.
No, that's the way. That's that's why you're the
sales whisper, right? I mean, at the end of the day,
you go, in you go, you're supposed to give them money, and
then at the end of the day they give you money and then somehow
they go like, I don't know what happened.
So did they finish the tattoo while you were passed out or no?

(05:31):
No, like, all joking aside, no, like the guy freaked out because
I like, seized and did all kindsof weird, like, fish out of
water. Oh no, Yeah, I went full like,
you know, I'm not. Was it?
Like an allergic reaction or youwere just anxious and nervous?
No, you know what it is like? Like I have a thing called
muscle vagal or something like we're at my nerves, like if my
body will want to just shut down.

(05:51):
So it's like if I'm going and getting something, anything
painful, my body's like, hey, wegot to like shut this down.
And I'm like. You like those little Billy
goats that that Billy goat to freeze and fall over?
Damn, I thought for sure you'd have said something better than
a Billy goat, but yeah, that's pretty much me.
That's. What?
They are right, the little Have you seen them, The little goats?
Oh, yeah, my wife wants them. Yeah, my wife.
Is she? Oh, my God.
She'll send me. They're called fainting goats.

(06:12):
Yeah, I'm not sure. If I had a dollar for every time
I got sent to a fainting goat, Iwould.
I could. I'd be a thousandaire.
Seriously. That kind of cash.
You're welcome. Yeah.
That's funny. All right, well, moving right
along, this is not the Fainting Ghost podcast, all right?
Although we could probably sell them.
We could. Shit, we could pivot.
Yeah, I. Mean we have AIAI does

(06:34):
everything so we could just pivot.
I could just like talk to my computer right now, right?
Build us a website e-commerce. But we don't launch it.
I mean, how do we know that you're not AI mean?
I could be, yeah, I could be sleeping right now.
This could be my clone. Hey, and then you know with
trace views how to eliminate allthe negative reviews.
So we'll have 1 trillion positive reviews so we can sell

(06:54):
these goats for any price we want.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's that's the goal.
My goal is just to get as many goats as possible because that's
what in retirement, I told my wife I'm going to travel and
apparently she meant get a farm.Like yeah, no, that's exactly
what I meant. Yeah, it's nice, all right.
But AI is in your name. So.
OK, let me ask you this. AI is in a way, it's been around
a long time, right? But it's also gotten hyper

(07:16):
popular and at an exponential scale in the last year, you
know, using AI in your name. Do do people think, oh, this is
new and maybe come at you with some hesitancy?
Or is it like, oh, it's new, this is awesome.
Let me get on board before it, you know, still low and
affordable, whatever, you know what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So really we started using AI.

(07:39):
It was about 3 years ago. So this is before ChatGPT and
everything. And really I had a very general
knowledge of what AI was. I mean, you had an idea of what
it was. And back then it wasn't, you
know, I would say commercial where it is today, right, where
everybody hears about it and gotprompts and you can do this and
all kinds of websites. It's sometimes difficult to keep
up. But what we use AIAI for was
what we were looking at is that when we're filing cases.

(08:01):
So, you know, we obviously remove reviews for sellers on on
Amazon. And what we were looking at is
we started getting more and moreclients is like, first it was
eyeballs. We'd have, you know, these
people, these they're called humans, I think.
Well, they're going to be gone soon anyways.
In the next few months. Pesky carbon.
Yeah, look at the wheel space. Like that's going to be the end.
I mean, anyways, it's close, butyou guys will probably hear this
podcast. This will probably come out

(08:21):
right before the demise. But yeah, so at the end of the
day, like the, you know, we werelooking at doing is, is we had
people or humans that were taking a look at these these
reviews and they're making assessments whether they were
against Amazon's guidelines or not.
So that's really a premise of what we do.
Well, I mean, we these people could only work for hours in a
shift, right? Because it's like you're at
nauseam. You're just staring at the
screen. I do it for long periods of

(08:43):
time. That's the reason why I wear
glasses now probably. But and, you know, it's just,
it's one of those things that wesaid, hey, how are we going to
do this faster? Like, how are we going to like,
you know, make this a, a system so that we can like pump through
these things because we, we havea monitoring system too.
So we have 500 clients. So there could be thousands of
reviews that happen on a daily basis.
So how do you handle that, right?
How do you scale? And so we looked at it and then

(09:04):
AI was with God. This is a natural thing that we
could do, right? Because it's, it's a very easy
to, what we did is we built it out through machine learning,
obviously, and use keywords and all these different things.
And it's obviously over time, itgets better and better and
better as you use it. And so we built that out.
I mean, that was what we were doing is saying, hey, instead of
going through, we just looked for certain keywords.
So you can't customer review on Amazon.
That's against Amazon's own guidelines.

(09:24):
So guess what? And I don't need to, I don't
think I need to tell everybody all the cuss words we added.
But you get it, you know, right.We're using the S word, the F
word that all the fun words, andwe put those in there.
And that's something that in a really simplistic way it goes
and it takes a look at it. And hey, if you have the F word
and a review, guess what? Then it gets flagged.
You know, what happens is now myteam of humans actually take a
look at it and we'll file cases for those sellers to be able to

(09:45):
get that removed. Because you can't cuss and you
can't mention competitors, you can't mention pricing on
Amazon's platform. That's Amazon's own rules.
So that's really how we started using AI.
Originally we weren't even, you know, it wasn't dot AI.
We were a company called Cellitech back in the day and
then we decided to break that off because it became so popular
and that's when we started usingAI.
So that was kind of how it all came about.

(10:06):
I'm like I said, I don't have the AI tattoo.
I know enough about AI to be dangerous.
But that was yesterday, right? Today I'm probably an idiot and
have no idea what's going on. So, you know, every day is a new
adventure with AI. It's it's fun.
It's fun. Yeah, it is crazy.
That's the roller coaster is pretty insane.
So we'll, you know, but like anything, if you, you can either
be on the sidelines and staring at it and have it go past, or
you can jump on that wave and try to ride that thing on in.

(10:29):
Yeah, it's, it's interesting forsure.
So what are you removing? Like if I this, this microphone
arm, for instance, I bought it on Amazon and it was fine.
And then it just broke it just literally my, my microphone went
to dunk and hit the desk and I try to reach out and this
company, it's like they have a regular website looks good at

(10:50):
the top. You Scroll down and they have
Lorem ipsum, you know, Latin placeholder tax, like a
WordPress template. I'm like, that's, that's odd.
But they sell a crap ton of of stuff.
I mean, they're a legit company,but and you know, probably
overseas and they just push everything through Amazon.
But I couldn't get any support, you know, so I gave them a bad

(11:13):
review. And so you're not taking down
legit reviews, right. It is it the the scammers or
like somebody, somebody gets butt hurt about somebody and
just tries to like do a a hatchet job on them.
Yeah. So there's, there's a few things
that we go after. So the main, one of the main
things is, is obviously, as I said, like the violation of
Amazon's guidelines. So if somebody comes and writes

(11:34):
a legit review, obviously the whole point of a legit review is
for you as the owner to come take a look at that and say, OK,
how can I make the product better, right?
Assuming that it's legit review.So that to me is not a bad
thing. We, you're going to get that no
matter what you do. If you launch a product, you,
you know, build the restaurant, you do any of this stuff, you're
going to get bad reviews. You're not going to satisfy
everybody. That's the first and foremost.
You just got to realize that if it you get a bad AD review and

(11:56):
it keeps you up for a week, it'sgoing to be a really long career
for you and that journey is going to be hard.
So what I tell people is like, hey, just accept it.
Take a look at it. What we take a look at is, is a
lot of fraudulent stuff. So we're maybe somebody's a
competitor and they have a buyer's account and they come
and buy your product and give you a one star over and over and
over, which knocks you down in the sales rankings.

(12:18):
And then guess what? They get use that same account
and they give themselves five star reviews.
So what we'll see is those are so that's fraud, right?
That's so those are going to be a situation.
Oh, it's crazy. The amount of stuff like in the
supplement space on Amazon is pretty, pretty insane.
Like there's we have clients that have spent six figures with
us in the supplement space. Yeah, removing reviews and they
don't even flinch at the cost because they know that they're

(12:38):
getting attacked and things are happening.
But there's so much money in thesupplement space for a lot of
these big clients that we have. So we see some pretty awesome
things there. Once again, just cleaning that
up. What we're really doing is
looking to even the playing field.
Yeah. We're never going to be able to
remove all negative reviews and and even if we had that that
option, I wouldn't want to do that.
Like there is some there's valuein learning that.
I tell people all the time, likea a client of mine right now

(13:01):
doing this postcard thing we were talking about before I hit
record. You know, he's a he's an eye
doctor. He's my eye doctor.
He goes to my church, great guy.And he has he has a 4.9 rating
on Google reviews like 686 review.
Like I've never seen so many andI'm like 4.9 is fine.
Like you, you don't want to be perfect because I've seen
studies. It's like people literally will

(13:22):
question if you're you know, 1000 reviews 5 star like maybe
OK and and he might get there right?
Like legit. But having having some
negatives, it just shows you're human and it's like.
And it's gonna happen. It's OK, Yeah, it's OK. 4.9
You're fine. They're gonna, I think I trust
them more now than if he had a five star review.

(13:44):
Yeah, and that's. Five star, you start to
question, you start to go, OK, wait a second, That can't be
right now if they just open and they have three reviews, great,
Yeah. 5 Stand, 1550 even. Yeah.
A lot a decade in business, you know, seeing thousands of
people. Okay, 4.9, That's fine, yeah.
Yeah, that's good. I mean, that's really good,
actually. People look at that and say,
hey, that's that's somebody thatI want to work with.

(14:05):
And especially if they have, youknow, you sounds like he has
hundreds of reviews. The other value to that is that
he's also getting ahead of the game because if somebody, if he
does have a bad experience with somebody, somebody comes and
slams and gives him one star, it's probably not going to knock
down his 4.9 because he has 600 good ones, right?
That. So that's another thing too, as
we talk about, you know, reputation management and how do
you keep control of that reputation because if you don't,

(14:25):
somebody else is going to right,Especially when it comes to
online stuff. So you know, for us, we're just
looking at reviews, fraudulent stuff, but we anything that
violates Amazon's guidelines too.
So it could be a legit review that somebody decide to throw a
few F bombs in there or decided to mention pricing.
So, you know, what we do is we're just playing by Amazon's
rules and saying, hey, that could be a legit review, but you

(14:45):
can't drop F bombs in there. That's not going to be, it's not
appropriate. We don't see that for the kids.
And so we should get that removed.
But yeah, the legit stuff, we, our, our success rate is going
to be right around 10 to 20%. So we only file on, on things
that actually have violations against Amazon's guidelines.
We're not filing against everything.
If you come to me and said, hey,this is a terrible review.
And I'm like, well, is it true? Yeah, it's true.

(15:06):
But like, I really want to get it now.
And it's like, well, that's, that's not going to work for us.
We had a a big, big aggregator that's a lot of them are gone
now. But like the aggregators are
like VCs kind of for in the Amazon space service, you know,
buying up a lot of Amazon based businesses.
And I had one of them that came to me and wanted me to get a
product. There's like 3000 units left.
They're like, yeah, we want to get down these reviews so we can
sell this product. And I was like, oh, what's wrong

(15:27):
with the product? Like where are you trying to get
rid of it? And he's like, well, it's, it's
toxic. And I said what?
And he goes, yeah, it's toxic. And I'm like, well then
shouldn't you like discard of it?
Like I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm not an environmentalist
by any means, but I, I do, you know, I'm not a doctor either, I
don't think. But you know, like, shouldn't
you guys just get rid of it? And he goes, no, no, we want to,
we want to sell it. Yeah, we want to hurt and get

(15:48):
rid of it. Like, no, I can't help you, man.
Like not going to have you put toxins on the streets and me get
paid for those reviews. You know, like that's just not,
that's not how we do things. I mean, our thing is like, we
want to even the playing field. We want to help out sellers.
It's already hard enough to sellon Amazon or any platform,
right? Just to be an entrepreneur.
And so it's like, these are the things.
And then when you start getting intact and things happen, it's
just it really sucks, especiallywhen you spend so much time on

(16:10):
launching a product and you knowabout that.
I mean, you're a sales guru. So, you know, it's like you put
so much time an effort into thatin Amazon, you can get one, one
star review and it'll kill your launch.
You're done. Like there's nothing, no matter
how much time your R&D, you can spend two years on this and that
and the other. So what we're doing is even the
playing field and saying, Hey, listen, let's, there's no reason
to attack each other. I am, you know, unfortunately

(16:30):
from an ROI perspective, some people think it's, it's, that
makes sense. But those are, you know, I'm a
big fan of karma. And it's like, man, you just,
it's not a way to do business. You don't need 6 Ferraris last
time I checked like you can. There's, you know, there's
enough money for everybody and it's.
Says. Well, you.
Need 7 Come here 7 days in a week.
You need 8 because there's always one needing repair.
Wow, that's a lot to take in. I'm not.

(16:52):
I'm going to talk to my accountant about that.
Listen. Yeah.
I need a few more cars. My wife will love that.
That'll be perfect. I can't wait to bring it to her.
Wes told me I need another car. Go live with Wes.
How about that? Hey, we got room.
Five of my seven kids have movedout.
We got a we got a guest room. Well, looks like.
Oh good man. Looks like this worked.
I got him this came out of the backside.

(17:14):
Didn't see me coming all of a sudden.
I'm living with you brother. That's awesome man thank you.
This is being reported too. Dude, we are.
You just missed the inaugural Shaffer Kegger.
So put it on your calendar. April 10th, You're in Reno.
You can drive. It's not that far.
Yeah. Friday, April 10th, 2020.
Sixth, the second annual ShafferKegger.
You don't have a birthday in April, do you?
No, I mean I could. I could change that however you

(17:36):
want. Yeah.
You're an honorary. Everybody has an honorary.
April 30th birthday. Man now you're just flirt.
You saw the red beard and if youbrought up a kegger that I would
just start losing my mind. Hey we we legit did keg stands.
I I may embed the video on your episode.
Here it was. It.
Was funny. I got a keg stand.
I haven't done a keg stand. I haven't done a keg stand in a

(17:59):
million years. I was not very good at it, but
we did it. Two weeks for me, but I get it.
And everybody does things differently, you know, I don't
I've. Been Well, it's breakfast.
Yeah. It's been like 30 minutes.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm training for next year for you guys, this big thing in
April I'm. Like I always, I always make
sure, I mean, I'm disciplined. I don't do any keg stands, you
know, within 30 minutes of starting a podcast.

(18:20):
So I mean, I'm a professional. Yeah, now I could smell it on
your breath. You smell amazing.
Yeah, April 10th. Come on down.
I will. You think I'm joking?
I'm putting it on my April 10th.There we go.
It's good weather down here. You know, you can actually, if
you time it right, you know, youyou may be able to get some snow
skiing in. Well, yeah, you can come down,
hit Mammoth. You just make a week of it, man.

(18:40):
Hit Mammoth, do some skiing, come down here, drink some beer.
Saturday hangover, go recover onthe beach.
Sunday drive back home. Piece of cake.
I got it all figured out. No, that's awesome.
You should be should be like a motivational trainer or
something. And that makes me want to go out
there and do bad things and be dehydrated and then go out there
and burn myself on the beach. So.

(19:01):
I'm going to be a travel agency.I'm going to helping people map
out their trips to party to keg parties.
Yeah, that makes sense. The kegger agency or something,
It's coming to me. I'm I'm feeling I'm going to put
it in the AI and say give me some, some names.
Yeah, they could probably start your business within hours.
So what the does Amazon like nothave the bandwidth?

(19:25):
Or do they they just don't care about these reviews?
Or is it just too hard for them to specialize in it so they just
leave it up to third parties? Yeah, I mean, I believe that
Amazon does the best they can. I mean, obviously they're
insanely huge platform, right? So excuse me.
So they're an insanely huge platform.
So at the end of the day, it's like I believe they do
everything they can the same waythat I believe Google, you know,

(19:47):
tries to stop spammers and scammers and you know, all these
things. But the minute that you know,
and I hate calm cockroaches, butthe minute that you stomp this
one out, 10 more come around, right?
So I think there's always a way around the system, especially
when there's money involved, right?
People are always looking for ways to, to, to game the system.
So I think that happens a lot with just with any platform that
you sell on or any place that you're trying to get higher

(20:09):
rankings or more sales. Any time there's a a challenge
or somebody out there willing totake that challenge.
And so I think that's where, youknow, Amazon does I think the
best they can. We just kind of pick up the
slack where they. Or they're not, you know,
picking up the ball, right? So it's like, and with millions
and millions and millions of probably billions of reviews on
Amazon, there was a lot of things that were missed.
It just that's just the way thatit is.

(20:30):
And So what we do is we take a look at that like that
historical data of like the reviews all the way back to when
the ACEN. So an ACEN is like a skew that
you have. And so an ASIN all the way back
to when that ASIN was created. So we grab those reviews, we run
those to the AI and then we filecases on those and say, Hey,
Amazon, and this is against yourguidelines or hey, we feel like
this is, you know, a fraudulent situation and we have to have,

(20:51):
we're going to do a fraudulent case with Amazon that needs to
have a smoking gun. Like it's not a hey, I
potentially think something happened.
Can you look into it? Amazon doesn't work for you,
right? As a seller, right?
So you got to be able to do, yougot to look at the information,
look at the stats. You got to really bring them a
file and say, Hey, this is all of things that are that are
going on here. I want you to take a look at
this because Amazon does take fraud very seriously.

(21:11):
Obviously so does the FTC and everybody else that regulates
and doesn't, you know, once you make it so consumers don't get
confused, that's, that's going to be, you know, those things
are going to be interesting whenwe file those cases.
Once again, it's once you removea buyer's account that's
fraudulent. That is huge success for our
clients because they're losing tons of one star reviews and the
client or the the competitors losing their five star reviews.

(21:33):
So that's that's where things get really.
Interested. You're not just taking down a
review, you're taking down the whole person If, if they're we
can't or whatever. Yeah, if it's a buyer's account,
what we do is we look at it. So give me an example.
So let's say somebody is buying creatine, you have a creatine
company, right, supplements. And so creatine, you know, there
are some different creatines, but at the end of the day,
creatine is creatine for the most part, right?

(21:54):
I mean, there's different quality and stuff.
So what happens is if my client is getting attacked, this
somebody's buying their product and giving them a one star.
What they do is Oh my God, worstcreatine ever diarrhea.
I wear an eye patch now. I lost my leg and people are
like, Oh my God, that's crazy. It's over creatine now.
Do you wanna take the Pepsi challenge and buy that creatine
and find out that John was joking or that he was fake?

(22:15):
Of course not. You're like, I'm gonna move on
to the next creatine. Well, guess what?
Then you have your then they talk about the competitor and
they go, my God, best creatine ever.
I ran my personal best. I'm, you know, now benching 400
lbs from 120 lbs like life is really good.
I've got another, I've got my 7th Ferrari, which makes sense
because I've seven days in a week.
You know, there's a lot of things that add up because of
this creatine, you know, so we look at that and go, wait a

(22:37):
second. Like that's if they're
comparable products. That doesn't make sense, right?
So then we take a look and then usually it's a very it's usually
one stars and five stars, right?And if they've written tons of
reviews. So in those situations, we're
going to absolutely go after that.
It happens less than obviously violations of Amazon's own
guidelines because there's a lotof things that can can happen
there. But when they do, it's it's

(22:57):
amazing for the clients because they love that.
Because in there it's called their BSR.
Their best seller ranking goes crazy.
They go down, which you want to get closest to one for a best
seller ranking and their star ratings go up.
So usually see a pretty crazy twist, a little turn of events
there, which is nice for the clients.
You know, that's what I enjoy. Yeah.
Can you help individuals? Because now that I think about
it, this has been going on almost a year.

(23:19):
I've tried to leave a review a couple times and I'm locked out.
It says suspicious activity or something.
I'm like I've never done anything on Amazon, why can I
not leave reviews? Why do they think I'm a scammer?
I mean, that's something you should ask yourself.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. That was about Amazon.

(23:40):
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn't know what you were.
Sorry. Well, I'm just saying like.
Look. Delete.
Oh well. What happened to this episode?
Maybe you should talk to ChatGPT.
Maybe I could tell you why you're a scammer.
I don't know why you're a scammer, Wes.
Like, I don't. I feel like we've gone
backwards. I don't I'm not here to figure
you out. You ask the questions, OK?
I don't. I mean, I don't.
I wasn't even prepped for this. I didn't know that you were

(24:00):
going to ask me questions about you and your psyche and your
personality and how. You only drink in every other
episode, but man, you're usuallyit's at the end, but I'm going
right in the we're not even halfway through and I'm.
You want to party, you want to party or you tell me brother,
I'm Irish, don't think I don't have a beer within inches of my
hand at. All they say they say God
invented whiskey so the Irish wouldn't take over the world.

(24:21):
But. I'm Irish and we're not taking
over anything but we have a hardenough time taking over a
toilet. Conor McGregor he's coming out
swinging baby. I like I like what I'm hearing
yeah that's a but anyway, but anyway, why does Amazon think
I'm a scammer? I.
Don't know it's you know have. You ever heard of that?
So I have and then I have where people can't write reviews or

(24:42):
they write reviews and they don't.
You don't see them. I don't know why that is.
It gives me an error big and I've I've emailed them whatever
I'm like. And you know, I've, I've had a
couple of books on on Amazon andI used to sell man, 1518 years
ago I sold a book, a reseller ofa book.
So, but I mean, I don't have a lot of activity on Amazon, so I
don't, I don't write a lot of reviews.

(25:03):
So yeah, but it's. And I can't get an answer.
They won't reply because like friends on this podcast, right,
people, they come on show, they're launching a book.
I'll go out and try to leave them a review and and it
happened just a few months ago. I said, Matt, I can't leave you
a review. I did a screenshot and like if
you so just reply to them because this one guy is kind of
aggressive and he's been throttled on Amazon.

(25:25):
Just reply to OK, well, you knowbetter than me.
Just crickets. Like, hey, I can't leave you a
review, man. Do you?
And that's kind of that's so crazy because it's like it's
especially because you're not, you know, taking advantage of
the system. If you're buying something, you
should be able to leave a review.
Maybe it's because you're a white male.
Dude, that could be that day that that ship is that tide is

(25:46):
turning, so praise the Lord. Yeah, no, that's good.
So we can start writing reviews again.
Super. Excited.
There's. A.
One day I'm going to memorize where all my books are, but I
did a review on a book called Pendulum and I'm having the
author on Michael Drew. He's a co-author with Roy
Williams. And they've been talking about
how society swings on this pendulum and goes, we take a

(26:08):
good thing too far and then we take it too far the other way.
And so, and it was eerie, man. They wrote this book almost
almost 20 years ago, 15 years ago.
Forget exactly, but I've shared it.
I did a review on it myself. And it was like right on, right
on cue, man. They, they were saying 2023
would be the freak peek. You know, it's my own, my own

(26:30):
word. But we take things too far.
And I mean, you know, they're burning Teslas because.
Because why? OK, all right, whatever.
So, you know, five years ago they were burning Suburbans
because you're killing the earthby a Tesla.
Now they're burning Tesla's. But anyway, I digress.
They push things too far. And.
And it is. And I literally think like the

(26:50):
Bud Light commercial with the the dude, you know, thinks he's
a woman. Like the that blew up so hard,
so fast, so severely. Yeah, You know, the woman was
let go because they were, you know, they were bragging he was
first female, you know, VP of a major brand and blah, blah,
blah, you know, beer brand, whatever.

(27:11):
And I'm like, if they had run that ad two years earlier,
there'd have been an uproar, butit wouldn't have broke the back.
But I think it was literally thetiming was literally 2023, like
early 24. It's just people are
predictable. Yeah, that's crazy.
I'll have to read that book. It's called Pendulum.
Yeah, I golly, I'll find it and send you a text, but, well, you

(27:34):
know how to use Amazon, right? Oh, there it is.
Yeah, I mean, I can write reviews if that's what you're
asking me. You can probably find how to buy
a book, but there it is. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Google.
There it is. Pendulum.
Oh yeah, yeah, Michael Drew's coming on the show next.
Nice. So smart guy I've known Roy
Williams, New York Times bestselling author.
Smart guy. So the tide is turning.

(27:56):
But I anyway, you keep saying wee wee wee we we we all the way
home. So do you have a partner like a
co-owner or who's who's we at Trace Fuse?
No, we as we, as me and my team.So it's just so this.
Was like how did you get starteddoing this?
Yeah, good question. I, I actually, the way I got
started is I had clients who were in the Amazon space and I

(28:17):
was kind of looking to do like aSAS type product.
I had a lot of friends who were doing SAS products and I was
like, I really want to do something, you know, I want to
make money while I'm sleeping, so.
What were you doing for your clients?
Consulting, yeah, I do e-commerce consulting,
influential marketing, SEO, all from Shane Barker.
And so, yeah, so I was doing a lot of consulting there and I
kind of was talking to people inthe Amazon space and saying,
hey, what are your pain points and what do you got going on?

(28:38):
And they're like, yeah, reviews on Amazon.
And that was a common thread. You know, this was about five
years ago. So I said OK, well, this, you
know, sounds like it should be pretty easy to do.
I was humbled extremely quickly.It only took two years to figure
it out. I mean, this, you know, small
amount of time, who cares? You don't need to get paid
during that time anyways. You can just volunteer and just
throwing all your cash and just.Sell one of your 18 Ferraris

(28:59):
should be. OK, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Which I did because I was like, anyways, it was a Prius, but I
don't want to get in. That's not, it's like a my
Ferrari, I call it my Ferrari. And so, yeah, so I jumped into
it and we really, it took about two years.
We finally cracked the code on different departments you can
file with, with Amazon and obviously fully compliant with
Amazon. That's another thing we want to
make sure we weren't, you know, dropping the ball anywhere.

(29:20):
And now we have, should we have 500 clients and removed over
13,000 reviews. So we're, we're the only company
that's done anything close to that.
There's no consultants second toonesies and twosies, but we are,
we, we put a system behind it. And so it's been been an awesome
ride. I mean, in the beginning, when
we started it, everybody thoughtit was all Black Hat, which is
like, you know, illegal stuff, stuff you shouldn't be doing.

(29:41):
And so I had to slap my face on there, you know, just mainly
because when people think I'm super attractive, that was
always that brought up sales just in.
So I mean, just look at me. I mean, I feel you.
I feel you. I know, I know.
You know that when you first, when I popped on, you said
species, you said, man, look at that guy.
And I was like, well, that was kind of interesting.
Yeah. But anyway, he said.
Look at that unit let. Me put a shirt on if we're going

(30:03):
to do it. I didn't know we were doing
video. Sorry about that.
It's early in the morning, you know what I'm saying?
Got all jacked up. I did 1 episode with my shirt
off. Did you?
I did. Do I can I ask who your guess
was like RuPaul or or who was it?
Who was your? I'm just asking, I'm trying.
To start, I got to go look him up.
He did one with his shirt off. He was a fitness guy.

(30:23):
That is awesome. I actually done that.
Like I had one time there was a guy this was a long time ago
that like guy came out he did was putting his shirt on or no
what was it was a sale. Was it a something where I was
like oh we're taking our shirts off.
So I took my shirt off and they're like what are we doing?
So like 3 guys and my wife came in and she's like what are you
what is going on? I was like, close the door.
Jesus, knock. What are you doing?
Like, I don't. I'm in a meeting.

(30:44):
I'm in a meeting. Like you don't have your shirt
on. I was like, you know what,
woman? I swear to God. close the door.
Put the lotion down. OK, Now we've gone too far.
We've gone too far. But I know.
Oh my. Gosh, that's awesome.
Yeah, 715 episodes and one of them I did with it without a
shirt. No, that's good.
That's a good number. Yeah, I'm kind of in control.

(31:05):
So what about I shouldn't go here pants.
Asking for a friend. Do you always wear pants on
podcast? I know we're we're just going
super South. If you're if you're in my my
1997 per month membership, you can see whether or not I'm
wearing pants. You too can see the joy of
magic. OK, it's all included.

(31:26):
All included in that price. So funny story, right?
So my office is now upstairs, but for many, many years I was
in the front room, our guest room and and as a kid started
moving out of the house. We had seven kids in this house
and I work from home and we had a dog.
I mean, I don't know how I got anything done, but you know, the

(31:46):
front door, Amazon coms, neighbor com, whatever dogs
barking. I got a solid wood door.
I mean, nothing helped me and itwas, it was always and we
homeschooled. So it was like, OK, wow.
But you know, I was down there for years and I'd be I'd come
downstairs right in my shorts, but then I'd have like a
collared shirt on, whatever. And my little ones like Daddy,

(32:08):
you making a video today? Like they they knew.
Yes, baby Daddy's making a videotoday.
That's too cute, that is. Everything that Kevin O'Leary
like he's in a full on suit, youknow, tie and shorts, Yeah.
I mean, why not? Yeah, everybody had.
It's so funny. You see, like I remember 20 or
30 years ago, right. Like you see a behind the scenes

(32:28):
and you see, like a news anchor in tennis shoes or something.
Like. Yeah, what?
Like, you know, you're just shocked.
Yeah. Yeah, you don't.
You don't. See down below.
So that's a whole. Different kind of movies are
made, you know, just the fronts of buildings, like, oh, that's I
didn't want to see that. And that was John Wayne.
And like, it was all fake. No A.

(32:49):
Lot of reality there, a lot of reality.
Crazy world. Yes, it is.
So why do you stick with it so long, man?
Because I mean, two years is a long time.
Yeah, I'll be honest, at the endof that two years, I was
thinking, man, I need to probably get a job at Starbucks
or something, like just something, bring some cash back
in. I was, you know, I was doing
consulting and doing stuff I'd, you know, government contracts
and other stuff that I was doingat that time.

(33:11):
Yeah. I stuck with it because I
because of a hard headed entrepreneur that didn't want
to, you know, like I, I might even count.
And everybody was like, Hey, I don't know if you're going to
figure this out. And I was like, well, I don't
have to fire you, but I would save money.
Remember that. OK, I have two more years to
figure this out. So yeah, I mean it, it took a
while, man. It wasn't an easy process.
But the other thing I also knew as being an entrepreneur is

(33:32):
like, hey, it takes me two yearsand I'm not really that smart.
It would take somebody that was really smart, like 6 months,
right? So I was like, OK, so I at least
have a six months jump on anybody else that's somewhat
smart And me, I'm just, you know, trying to figure it out
and just trying to say sober. How do you get the word out?
Well, we, I mean, really what I was doing, I was going to
events, I was going to all Amazon events where we'd have

(33:55):
Amazon sellers and just tell them, hey, listen, this is what
we do. And once again, as I said, when
I first started, everybody was side eyeing, you know, like,
yes, sounds a little funny. And you sure not out of China.
And like, do I, you know, when we, when I pay you, do I have to
meet you in an alley? And I'm like, I do have a black
van, but that's not for this business.
And so anyways, yeah, it was, itwas an interesting situation
because people really were like,you seem nice and kind of funny

(34:17):
and, you know, but I just don't know if you're going to be able
to do this. And so we went, you know, we
started bringing clients on and started moving reviews and now
we're at 13,000. So now I'm at the other speaks
Speaking of pendulum from zero to like, hey, we can get this.
I promise we can do this. We've done testing.
Now we have 13,000 people like, yeah, there's no way you've done
that, right? So I went from like 0, no way
you can do it to 13,000. Like, yeah, that's not possible.

(34:39):
And I'm like, I just can't win. So actually I can't win because
I am winning. But yeah, I mean, you know, I
looked at now. So now people, the good part
about it now is I've gotten pastthat hump of I don't need to
convince people. Like in the industry of Amazon,
which even though it's big, it'spretty small.
And so there's like Amazon groups of people that you know,
literally there's like, you know, the Orthodox Jews that

(35:00):
have like their own community, there's the Mormons that have
their own Amazon stuff like it'sthese different communities.
And so once. Warrior forums back in the day.
That's exactly it. That's exactly it, yeah.
And So what happens is now these, they have some success.
Guess what? Everybody wants to share the
successes they're having. So now I'm doing, I mean, I do
probably 30 to 50 interviews or not interviews, but like demos a

(35:21):
week. And now I'm getting out of
probably about 2025% of them. I'm like, Oh, how did you guys
hear about us? And they're naming people I've
never even talked to. So it's nice when you get to
that point. I mean, obviously it's very
difficult to get there. You get to have, you know, good
branding and, you know, do rightby people and all that stuff.
You're not going to keep everybody happy, which makes
sense. But, you know, but it is nice
once you get to that point whereit's like, wow, I, I like to

(35:43):
give people referrals or say, Hey, buy you a coffee or a beer
or, you know, steak dinner, whatever.
Because I, I, I, people are referring to us and don't take
that lightly. So we try to keep control of
that and in a good way of like, hey, trying to make sure that we
give people attribution for, youknow, referring people to us.
So yeah, it's an interesting spot right now.
Like we're, we're, we only have 500 clients and I say only, and,

(36:03):
but there's 1.9 million sellers on Amazon and the US platform.
So I'm, I'm the absolute biggestcompany, the only one that's
been able to crack the code, butyet we're this big of a company.
So our, the, the growth opportunity is insane.
We've already have the, the everything in place, AI and all
that. And software is all built.
Of course, we're adding featuresas we go, but we're also trying
to stay pretty simplistic in thesense that we just focus on

(36:26):
reviews on Amazon because there's just such a big market.
Most people historically the oldShane would have been like, oh,
we got to add on 10 more services.
We got to do this. And, and it's like, you know
what, keeping it simple, this iswhat we focus on.
Amazon goes to the right, we go to the right with Amazon.
And we know that because of, youknow, the amount of cases we're
filing, we get a lot of information and Intel there.
So we know how to file cases, where to file cases with Amazon

(36:47):
because it's not an easy process.
It's it's not like you just click a button.
It's there's a lot of moving pieces.
There's been a lot of people that have obviously tried to do
what we do. And I'm actually even not
opposed to that. Like if somebody was able to
come along and figure out what we can do.
I, I just want to help sellers. So if you can do it ethically
and do good business and hey, rock on.
I have, I have no problem with competition.
You're not going to see me writing fake reviews for other

(37:07):
people. I that's not the way I do
things. And the more the merrier for
you, as long as your intentions are good and you're here to help
people and you want to make a dollar and you're going to do
good right by people. Rock on.
That's awesome. Yeah.
So what is the model? I mean, I got to imagine it's
like pay more upfront to get started and get it going and
then like a, a maintenance to kind of just monitor and and

(37:29):
then be a little more proactive moving forward.
Yeah, no, I'll give you. So we, we did things a little
differently when we first started off, we were doing a
retainer. And so I would grab like a
$20,000 retainer which a people are already going, I don't know
if you can do this. And I'm like, hey, just give me
20 grand. Let's see if we can work this
out and be like, that doesn't sound, yeah, doesn't sound too
crazy, which it was obviously. And so I had some early on

(37:51):
clients. Great.
We were removing reviews from everything was awesome.
Then what we decided to do, justto switch it up so that people
would be less worried about it is like, hey, why don't we do a
performance based right. So guess what, you only pay for
reviews that we actually removed.
So now we took away that becausepeople are worried, oh, what
happens if this and that I'm paying money and you don't
remove reviews. So we said, all right, we'll
flip it on the head and said, hey, I'll make, I'll take all

(38:13):
the risk away. I'll take on all the risk if I
file 100 cases with Amazon and don't get any reviews removed.
You don't pay anything. And people are like, but you do
that. I'm like, yeah, absolutely.
I'd do that. Well, guess what?
We've removed 13,000 reviews andwe charged $250 a review.
I mean, do the math on it. We're not doing too bad.
No, I didn't know if that was going to work.
I was hoping it was going to work, right.
I mean, at the end of the day, it's like, but we had some great

(38:35):
successes with that. We've really seen some amazing
things and we have, like I said,as I told you, we have some like
supplement clients that are paying us 6 figures, have paid
us 6 figures historically and that's performance driven.
Guess what, if I would have charged $1000 a month and
removed X amount of reviews, I wouldn't have been as, as
profitable as I am today. But once again, when I say that
any of my clients are listening,I am profitable.

(38:55):
We're doing well the but just remember we with a 10% success
rate, that means 90% of the timewe're failing if we're filing
cases. So, you know, it looks like
people go 250. Oh my God, that's crazy.
It's really not because we have 9 cases and when I talk about
filing cases with Amazon, a lot of times you have to file
another case and another case. There's a lot of back and forth.
Once again, if this was easy, there's tons of, you know,

(39:18):
Amazon based software companies that would be able to crack the
code and figure it out. They haven't been able to, no,
you know, today's a new day. You know, I expect that there
will be somebody knocking on my door here sooner than later, but
I'm OK with that. At the end of the day, you know,
like I said, as long as you're doing good business and you're
treating people right, Hey, you know, plenty of, plenty of,
plenty of Ferraris for everybodyor.
Do you have a tool, you know, like I use SEM rush, you know,

(39:39):
love it for, you know, crawling sides, finding broken links,
broken images, blah, blah, blah.Are you doing something similar?
Like, you know, if you take somebody on, there's got to be
some thresholds that, you know, like you don't even want to take
somebody unless they're big enough, right?
And, and they got to have enoughnegative reviews and you got to

(39:59):
trust that they're honest and that they're that those are fake
reviews, you know? Yeah, yeah, it's a good point.
How do you discern like these wheat worthy?
This is this is what's what's funny that you said so in the
beginning once again, we were performance based and what we
would do is we would only take on people that had at least 500
critical reviews, right. So what that meant is that if we

(40:20):
can remove. 500 critical. Critical so that's one twos and
threes yeah, fours and fives we don't even touch we're going
after the reviews that violate Amazon's guidelines that will
help people improve sales. OK so we were looking at 500
that was our our point the problem is there's how many
sellers have below 500, right and so we started pushing a lot
of people away but obviously we had the kind of the Creme the
Creme, right because we're looking.

(40:41):
If you have 500 critical reviewsyou've been selling on Amazon
for a few years, you probably know your numbers.
And so we were trying to get a different type of seller, A
seller that really knew, hey, I understand the value of removing
a review and 2:50 is nothing. And that's, we had a great
amount of, I mean, we were once again, we're taking on the top
five, 10% of Amazon sellers, very, very profitable.
And it was a great, great business.

(41:02):
But then what I said is like, well, you know, my bleeding
heart of, you know, wanting to help everybody was like, well,
what about the people that are under 500?
Like what about those people of the people that just launch a
product? And So what we decided to do is
we decided to put a take on an onboarding fee.
So what we did is we said, OK, hey, let's go ahead and you
know, get this thing going. We can take on clients under
500. Originally our onboarding fee

(41:24):
was 750. That's a one time fee.
It's an onboarding fee, but it'salso a lifetime monitoring fee.
So we have these things called merchant tokens, right?
So it's like a think of it like a a Target store, that's a
merchant token. And then inside Target, you have
all your SKUs or your Asens. So what happens is we we cover
that whole merchant token. So we cover all of your
inventory inside your target. And what will happen is if you

(41:45):
guys get come and attacked, you guys get attacked by Amazon,
somebody giving you bad reviews,we'll actually monitor that.
We grab those reviews and we file on them if they're against
Amazon's guidelines. So, yeah, so that's 750.
Now we actually have a promotionwhich we'll talk about.
We're given a $500 discount, so it's only 250.
And that's lifetime monitoring. So that's going to be, if
somebody's with us for 10 years,we continue to monitor those

(42:06):
Asians and protect them, which is really big during, for
Christmas and Prime Day, all these times when that's when you
can get attacked because it knocks you down.
And if you reach out to Amazon, it doesn't get fixed for a
month. Guess what?
You just lost all of your, your time, your money during your
busy season. And, and obviously competitors
know that. So our goal is to to have that
Moat around your castle, right? And we're going to be filing

(42:28):
cases and knock those down. So that's what we did.
Now we can take on anybody under500 critical reviews, really
anybody. And we have that onboarding fee
and that monitoring, which people really, really love.
And the goal of that is just to protect them moving forward so
that once again, even that playing field.
Yeah. And is there like a threshold?
Could you say 500? But, you know, let's say I have

(42:49):
100,000 reviews. I mean, is it even worth my
time, you know? Or, or conversely, like if I
only have 1000 reviews but 500 of them are negative, is that
like, OK, you're probably just not good.
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's something to take a look at.
I mean, when I do demos for for,you know, potential clients,
that's the things we look at. I'll tell them, hey, listen,
like at the end of the day, if you're to 3.3 or 3.2 and you

(43:13):
have, you know, 1000 critical reviews and 500 of them or, or
excuse me, you have a 500 or 1000 reviews in total, 500 or
critical. We have a calculator, literally
a calculator. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it is. And you probably probably really
should read all of them. We actually have a calculator
that's inside of our tool that they can move it over and they
say, hey, if you want to get from a 3.2 to a 3.5, it'll tell

(43:35):
you approximately how many critical reviews we need to
remove for you. So the reason why we did that is
for ROI, right? To say, hey, if you're going to
go, we have to move 40 reviews and that's going to cost 250
review, 10 grand. Is that worth it?
Did you go from 200,000 in salesdown into 100?
Right. It probably makes sense to move
that back up. If you went from, you know,
10,000 to 9000, it might not make sense unless you just want

(43:58):
to clean up your ASIN and you want to sell the brand or
something. Obviously that's beneficial to
clean that up. But yeah, I mean, there's
there's, you know, I don't want people to go and spend tons of
money with me if they're not going to have, you know, a
proper expectation of what that looks like, right?
So that's where we created the calculators.
Hey, go in and do the do the estimates.
If it makes sense, let's rock. If it doesn't make sense, let's
not do it. You know so.

(44:18):
For sure, like make it easy. I tell people all the time, you
know, on my Tuesday call on my inner circle, telling the guys
like here's my dirty little secret.
I hate sales. He's like what?
I'm like, I don't want to strongarm people.
I don't want these tough negotiations.
You know, all of the answers areon my website.
You know, I got 1700 posts goingback to 2008, 2009.

(44:41):
Like I've answered everything like I don't want to sell you.
I don't want to even educate you.
I've educated you. Go educate yourself.
Then come back. You know, let's talk.
You know, my, the my optometrist, right?
My friend, he said, Hey, I want,I want this ad.
You know, he sends me his business card and I'm like, Doc,

(45:04):
no. Stick to eyes.
So, so real quick, I made I madean ad huge font because this is
this is a massive, you know, 9 by 12 inch postcard, right?
So this thing it's huge, glossy and it's this size, right?
Well, actually we're doing them.Well, we can do either way, but
I think we're going to do them horizontal.
But either way, it's I made a huge font and it said if this is

(45:27):
blurry and I put shadows and stuff.
So it was blurry. Yeah.
Call to make it like optometry big phone number, you know, and
I put the five star reviews 4.9,you know, 686.
He's like, OK, let me talk to myteam.
Like doc, listen, I said, look, I would love to take your money.
I said, but if you run if you run a business card ad and it's

(45:47):
got like cursive fonts, I'm likeyou will get no business.
You're not going to get any business.
You know, I said unless you run this for like a year and you
just want to do like some branding, brand awareness, like,
OK, maybe. But like, no, like, trust me on
this. Run this ad.
Yeah. You run this ad for three
months, you're going to get business.
You know that ad that you talkedabout, they could use that for a

(46:09):
a meetings as well. I mean, I was just thinking
about that. If it's that blurry, maybe you
should put your beer down and go.
To well, and the crazy thing is he's super funny.
He's he's witty, he's fun. You know, he's a crack up.
And so it's, like, right in linewith his personality anyway.

(46:30):
But, I mean, you're trying to stand out, you know, when you've
got something like this, like, OK, what stands out?
That big flash sale. OK, let me.
Oh, look at that big font. OK, then.
Now let me read, you know? Yeah, these are fine.
OK I'll keep this because I liketacos but I don't know what the
ad is until I take time. Yeah, you know.
So you got to stand out. You do.

(46:51):
But my wife and I talked about that.
My wife is in in sales and worked at a newspaper and sold
ads and we'll we'll go by billboards.
I was like, what, what did you think that just said?
And it's the, and it's a billboard.
That thing is like, you know, it's 20 by 20.
And if I don't know within seconds or your font is super
calligraphy and it's like, wait,like it's, it's funny because
that's, you know, that's somebody that's just assume,

(47:13):
Hey, this is what I'm going to do.
And nobody's just saying, hey, that that's a terrible idea.
Do that at all. Like that's not a good idea.
But you know, I mean, there's some.
People, there's something for branding, right?
And if you get a big company, OK, McDonald's does branding,
you know, but they all, McDonald's also does promos, you
know, but it's like you're not McDonald's.
Yeah, you. Know if you don't have a billion

(47:34):
dollars and can wait a year for an ROI?
Yeah, that's not 99% of the businesses.
Yeah, that's what you have to look at.
It's like, what is your goal? If it's branding great and rock.
I mean, even then I think there's issues, but but at the
end of the day, it's like, what are your goals with this?
Right. You want to bring in clients?
Well, then you're going to have to hand it off to somebody and
say, hey, what does this say? Does this make you want to call?
And that's where we miss out on it.
It's like, I love it when peoplewould hire me and then tell me

(47:56):
what they want to do. And it's like, wait a second,
didn't you if your stuff was working so well?
I mean, I love you and I would love to help you, but why is it
that I'm giving you ideas and you're like, no, I'm going to go
with the original one? I'm like, OK, this is going to
last a long time. It's going to be a good
relationship. I can feel it in my blood.
Yeah, yeah. It's like I truly want to help

(48:16):
you listen to me. Yes, I'm crazy, but sometimes
I'm kind of crazy smart. At least I admit it.
And it's like this isn't it's inmy best interest to give you
feedback that creates results because you will keep
advertising with me. You know, yeah, absolutely.
So so we shall see. Fingers crossed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got an offer, so we

(48:38):
will link out to that. Where, where else should people
go to? They just check out your
website. What do you How can they learn
more about you? Yeah, so we've got, I've got two
things. So as obviously the website is
just trace shoes, TRACEFUSE dot AI, but I know we're also going
to give you guys a link where wealso created another thing too.

(49:00):
So this is for any Amazon sellers, I created a tool to
free tool where they can go in and put in their ASIN, which is
like a skew and it can run a report for them.
So it'll it'll run the report through the AI that we have
usually takes about an hour or two depending on how many
reviews they have and what it'lldo.
It actually creates a report forthem and they can take that
report and give that to Amazon and get those reviews removed.
So we're making it so now they can do it on their own, which,

(49:21):
you know, a lot of people are going to be like, it's kind of
cutting into your business. I'm OK with that.
Like literally I'm OK with that.It cost me quite a bit of money
to put together, but at the end of the day, I don't charge for
it because I want people to havemore success.
And I think that would be awesome.
So that's going to be, it's called Amazon Review Checker and
we'll have that in the notes as well.
You can go and put in a nice andthey run the reports for free.
You'll be able to see your reviews.
It's pretty awesome. Little dashboard and in the top

(49:42):
right hand corner has that calculator that we talked about
that you can toggle that thing over and see how expensive that
is. Yeah, they want to, you know,
try to remove the reviews themselves and how many think
they're going to have to remove.I mean, we're obviously going to
be here. If anybody wants any white glove
service, we'll take care of it for them.
But if not, you want to do it, do it be a do it yourselfer.
That's awesome. So we created that so they can
take a look at that as well. And then my e-mail, if anybody
ever wants to reach out and sendme motivational quotes or

(50:05):
something, my e-mail is Shane. That's SHA at tracefuse dot AI.
And then you can follow me on all the typical things, right?
I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram and X and all the cool
platforms, super active, talkingabout reviews and influencer
marketing, SEO, all the cool stuff.
Very cool. Yeah.
And I'll put all those links in the show notes.

(50:25):
And so it'll be easy, easy to find you.
You can't hide. I never did want to hide.
I've always wanted to be out there letting the world know.
Yeah, shirtless whiskey in hand.That's huge.
Those those usually go together.That's usually definitely a
combination. Nobody's ever been like, hey,
Shane, take your shirt off again.
I'm like, I mean, I can. They're like, no, no, I just

(50:47):
want people to know what it looks like and people that don't
work out anymore, like I know, Iknow I.
See empty bottles? Crushed beer cans?
OK, there's a naked Shane somewhere within 50 meters of
this pile of bottles. Man, it's it is dangerous.
Yeah. And I that's why my wife locks
this door in my office. I can't even get out of here.
She locks you in that little food slot like prisoners just

(51:10):
hand you a pimento cheese sandwich.
I can't. I'm not even supposed to be
close to schools or anything. Like they just keep me Very,
very I was. That was that don't Fact Check
that I'm a I'm a good citizen, damn it.
I do a good business and I treatpeople with respect so that
we're going to have to we'll keep that in the podcast, but
that was a joke. So if anybody's going to look.
At you remember, did you ever see Dudley Moore's Crazy People?

(51:34):
No. Is it good?
OK. Dude, it's like from the 80s.
You remember Dudley Moore? Yeah, of course, of course.
You know, drunk Brit, so he was an ad exec and and I don't
remember like if he had a legit like mental breakdown or if he
just went to like get away from it all.
But there's a scene. And so the, all the suits are

(51:57):
like, you know, we got come up with ideas and brainstorming
going around the room and well, because eventually, like, you
know, crazy people, he, he takesover the insane asylum and they
create ads. So it's like, it's, it's
wonderful, right? But the, the big company he left
there so that they're now struggling because he was the
rainmaker and the boss is like going around, come on, tell us
something. Tell us something like, Yo,

(52:18):
nobody's ever heard about you something, you know, I forget
exactly. This guy's like, I like small
children. The guy's like, not that honest.
It's like, you can't make that movie today, but like that
scene, you're like, whoa, wait aminute.
That just gave me goosebumps in a bad way.
I I joke, I make a tiny little joke, but hearing somebody say

(52:38):
that, I was like, Oh my God. They came up with an ad.
It was it was Jaguar for men whowant blow jobs for women they
don't even know. Dude, it was such a funny movie.
Oh, you got to. Go checked, I will look at this
weekend. That's my kind of human.
I think it's on the 80s, I mean.You can see anything.
I love it. I think Liza Minnelli was in it

(52:59):
because they've made a couple movies together.
Yeah, absolutely. They would perform because he
wasn't he. Is he a singer or piano player?
He was a great entertainer. Yeah, he was.
I remember because he also had somebody else.
It was another guy that he used to work with.
Oh, my God. I'll have to remember it.
I won't remember the next. 3 minutes.
I'll turn off the record and we'll do some Googling.
Yeah, Shane Barker, Chase fuse dot AI.

(53:23):
Come on show man. It's.
Been great catching up brother. Man.
Absolutely. Stay stay semi sober and if you
can't keep the camera off, all right, that's.
It I hear you I'm I got my shirton right now to show you guys
that I can do it it's. Not Seacrest out, it's Shaffer
out. OK?
No Irishmen nor leprechauns wereharmed in the recording of that
interview. I just want to put that out
there, OK. And you should mark your

(53:44):
calendar for April 10th, 2020. Sixth, we talked about that in
the recording or not, but that April 10th is going to be the
second Daniel Schaefer kegger. We have 6 birthdays in April, so
come on out. Cake stands, whiskey, it'll be
good. But hey, I hope you like that.
I had a lot of fun with Shane, so he's the real deal and I did

(54:07):
not even know his company existed.
You know, services like that. I'm not an Amazon seller, so it
was interesting. You know, there's a million ways
to make money in this world and,you know, find a need and fill
it. Kudos to him for having the
wherewithal, the bandwidth, the determination, the pig headed
stubbornness, you know, to to stick it out and build it.
And I get it. You know, you get this, the

(54:29):
inkling. It's like I got to go this way.
Like I feel there's something there.
And I forget the exact quote from Shaw, but George Bernard
Shaw, you know, he's something like, you know, the rational man
adjust himself to the world. You know, the irrational man
adjust the world to himself. And therefore all progress is
made by the irrational man. So you know that you've heard
the quote talking to Henry Ford,you know, said if I'd have done

(54:53):
a survey, if I'd have asked a customer what he wanted, he
would have said a faster horse. You know, Steve Jobs said
something similar like, you know, the customer doesn't want
know what they want to you show it to him.
And that's kind of true, you know, So when you see something,
when you, when you know an industry, right, he, he, he
didn't venture out into some crazy thing.

(55:13):
He had no experience And he he had experience.
He had mastered his craft. He had mastered that field.
So he was a tune to seeing, you know, a, a glitch in the matrix.
And he so he saw the opportunityand he grabbed it.
So, you know, acres of diamonds,right?
You're sitting on top of a fortune.
You just got to look down and get your hands dirty.

(55:35):
So, yeah, I know you may not have two years to make it.
Whatever. Fine.
So figure out a way to blossom where you're planted.
Sell some things on the side, you know, because sales,
salesmanship is key to everything.
You know fish don't know they'rewet.
People don't realize that they're immersed in marketing,
persuasion, manipulating, manipulation, sales.

(55:56):
You've got to see it all around you.
If you don't know the sucker is in the poker table, it's you.
If you don't realize what's going on, what's being done to
you, you're being taken advantage of and you're not
seizing the opportunities for yourself and for your clients.
OK, That's why I have the inner circle.
That's why I do my, you know, I pick my brain.
I just started a new series, youknow, 45 minute free call, you

(56:18):
know, hit the website, I'll linkto it.
That's right there on the homepage.
And, you know, I've always told my clients, give away your best
stuff for free upfront. And I said that this week to a
guy in my, my inner circle. And I've always said, notice
what you notice. And, and, but even me as an
expert, right? I've got to remember, take my

(56:39):
own advice because I had noticedthese videos that I didn't even
notice it was the same guy, but one guy, he does pressure
washing and he also does lawns and he does he does free work
and records it first, first channel, right?
I'm like, well, I love that too.So you'll start to see some
episodes of the sales podcast orjust me doing deep dives with

(57:03):
people that take me up on this 45 minute offer, You know,
because the caveat is I'll give them a free session and we'll
tackle their most pressing issues for 45 minutes.
But I'm going to record it And if they want to keep it and keep
it quiet because maybe we, we uncover some things they don't
want known, OK, then they can pay me for it.

(57:23):
You know, my, my pick my brain fee is a few 100 bucks.
So it's there's no extortion, right?
There's no gotcha. But if I give free time, then
that'll become an asset of mine that I will use to promote
myself, you know, and show people my, my line of thinking,
how I work. So then they can hire me.
So like I said, I'll link to that.

(57:45):
And so if you want me to, you want to pick my brain, that's
now out there. OK.
But take Shane up on his offer. If you're in the space, if you,
if you know someone in the e-commerce space and Amazon
space particularly, please direct him to Shane and they'll
benefit channel benefit, good karma will benefit you.
Everybody wins. All right, so thanks for
watching. Go sell something.

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