Forget excel sheets! Ben, Chris, and Dana are Amazon sellers from San Francisco who got frustrated managing PPC by hand and set out to automate the whole process with Prestozon. The founders met at our last company which was a supply chain finance and einvoicing company targeting large enterprises. As the company grew we decided we wanted to be on a smaller team again and set out to sell on Amazon and use our software and data backgrounds to automate the process where possible. We launched our first product ASAP (and made a bunch of mistakes) so we wrote software to help us find a better product to launch. Once we started doing PPC for our products we were amazed nobody had a good solution for handling it, so we set out to write Prestozon to automate the whole process. We did this while Dana and I were traveling in Asia (China, Sri Lanka, Bali, and Thailand) and Europe and we’re 100% bootstrapped.

What you’ll learn:

• How Prestozon was founded


• Why they started Prestozon


• How to optimize your Amazon PPC


• How to decrease Amazon ACOS


• How to increase ad spend and profits


• How to tweak product advertising settings


• Techniques to improve your Amazon advertisements


• Negative keywords and how they affect Amazon ppc

And much more. Show notes coming shortly.

Get in touch with Dana,Ben and Chris and learn more:

http://prestozon.com

https://www.facebook.com/prestozon/

DAVID: Great to have you on the show, guys.

BEN:    Thanks.

CHRIS:  Thanks. Good to be here.

DAVID: Can you guys take us in the beginning before Amazon, where did each of your journeys start?

BEN:    We actually all met at the same company building Enterprise Finance Software and we wanted to do another kind of smaller thing and we all decided to get into Amazon FBA.

DANA:            Yeah, we’ve all worked in software for most of our careers. All that you…

CHRIS:            Yeah.

DANA:            And we started in Amazon and then we then realized that Amazon software space is… there’s a lot of tools that weren’t available yet, so were like, all right, sound great. Like, we need these tools as sellers and we love building software so it’s kind of natural fit.

CHRIS:            Actually, we started from a different perspective first, so in FBA. We actually have this idea, like we want to start it automating from the scratch, so we actually built a market analyzer to figure out like if we start like what would be the best products to go with and that was kind of like our first attempt. But then, pretty soon, after we’ve figured out that there are a lot of other steps in between too that have gaps in how the tools work right now over this availability to make it easier for you as a seller. So we basically just started working our way through that.

DAVID: At this enterprise companies, I’m guessing it was a corporate sell company. How many employees were, was in that company?

BEN:    Actually it was a start up. We… I joined when there were 60 people.

CHRIS:            I joined when there were 30, but when we left it was…

DANA:            Yeah.

BEN:    200?

CHRIS:            … 250 or more?

BEN:    Yes. It was still a small company but…

DAVID: Right.

DANA:            The Company’s name was Taulia and it’s enterprise because we built software for the largest companies in the world. So, Coca-Cola, like Home Depot, I don’t know.

CHRIS:            Pfizer.

DANA:            Pfizer.  So we built software to handle their financial electronic invoicing. Payment. We handled like massive, massive data and they’re like really secure conditions so that set us up well to deal security with Amazon data.

DAVID: And was that like your guys’ first gig right out of college or just, you just went right into it?

DANA:            Oh no.

CHRIS:            No. I actually started working for a software company in Asia first. I’m originally from Germany as you can probably tell from my accent. And I started in a start up in Taiwan, building software security products so as to automatically analyze source codes to figure if there are any security vulnerabilities in verifications, and then eventually moved to San Francisco and then joined the Taulia the enterprise finance company. And I worked in both of those for over five years. So, five years and…

DANA:            Each. Yeah.

CHRIS:            In each, yeah. So, that’s definitely not my first gig right after college.

DAVID: Oh, wow.

DANA:            For me, I say that when I got in college so I went into finance. For about a year right out of college, then I just, I really wanted to get more into tech, so, actually I went traveling a bit and then I moved up to San Francisco and joined a couple of smaller start ups and then moved to Taulia and I was there for about three years.

BEN:    Yeah. And then I was doing software or data analysis for a video game company. And…

DAVID: Sweet.

BEN:    Yeah, I was pretty cool.

DANA:            It was a race car.

BEN:    Yes, it was a racing simulator video game so I really love race cars. That was for my background is that I used to built race cars and so then I got into data analysis and then it was kind of same skill set to do a financial data analysis just because there’s a lot of working with big data and Tolin was not really a good fit, so I worked there for three years.

DAVID: Were you in San Francisco before that too or…

BEN:    Yeah. I was in the Bay Area for…

DAVID: So why did you guys moved to San Francisco? It seems kind of like a big jump from Germany to San Francisco?

CHRIS:            Yeah, well, for me it was more like an organic live your own journey, so after—when I was in college, I did an internship in Taiwan actually for two months in the summer. It’s like a summer program. And I would, that was my first time in Asia, I mean I traveled a lot in like the US and Europe. But I was really fascinated with Chinese as a language specifically if you do computer science since you give it like language processing.

You have to deal with like how would you certainly process 6000 characters and alphabets in software, that was actually very fascinating and so I wanted to go back and after I finished college, I actually did a year of studying abroad where I learned Chinese in China and then join a startup company there because you know after you just spent a year learning a language why do you just go back and okay.  It would have been a waste of time so I wanted to stick around a little bit. And then that company actually opened an office in San Francisco and sent me over there and that’s how I kind of like got sent here and then I met my wife and got stuck here now and so.

DANA:            It’s not such a bad place.

CHRIS:            It’s not a, it’s a great place to live. Yes. So I’m not, you know, its not a burden to carry. Yeah.

DAVID: So what insights did you guys have, from Taulia, did I pronounce that company right? Taulia?

BEN:    Yeah.

CHRIS:            Yeah.

DAVID: From Talia. And then what instances did you guys have to go into Amazon, it seems like its, they’re both data driven but they’re kind of different, you know.

BEN:    Yeah. I mean I think, from my perspective there’s, the core of it is we want to find out how to make more money using the data. And the kind of, the skills that what you look for and the way you process the data, it’s pretty similar across a bunch of different applications. Hence, I mean, it was really useful because the skills I learned there, I’d just used to start automating our own PPC, and then we’re like, oh, hey, if we’re going to write some software automator on our own, we might as well just write-software automator for everybody’s

CHRIS:            Yeah.

BEN:    So, yeah I think there’re a lot of similarities.

DANA:            Yeah. Like once you know the space building software is a transferable skill so like… You’re the data scientist. For me, I do of more of a product design and user experience. And key, those are skills that apply whether you’re working on an enterprise financial software, or Amazon seller software, because we are Amazon sellers as well. So it’s, I know how it’s like to be one and so I can, it’s a process of like thinking hard about what the user might want to do when they come to a page and how to make the page clear for them. So that’s actually transferrable.

CHRIS:            Yeah.

DANA:            The skill.

CHRIS:            And then I mean, I’m a software engineer so I think the, maybe one of the takeaways there was the sheer size of the data volume, so if you’re processing hundreds of millions of invoices for large enterprises, then it’s also