Transcript

How I Retired My Wife - Steve Chou

From The Proven Podcast · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 49 min · 10,727 words · 116 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "How I Retired My Wife - Steve Chou", an episode of The Proven Podcast published August 8, 2025 (49 min, about 10,727 words). It mentions 53 people, works and ideas, including Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles, Philippines, Podcast.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, Podcast, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles
  2. – 10:00: Drop Shipping, Drew Whitman, The Container Store
  3. – 15:00: Handkerchiefs
  4. – 20:00: Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, United States (states)
  5. – 25:00: Eight Sleep Pod, Handkerchiefs
  6. – 30:00: Amazon FBA, Content Marketing, Meta Ads, Personalization
  7. – 35:00: 11 Labs, Drop Shipping, Fiverr, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles
  8. – 40:00: Philippines, Second Office
  9. – 45:00: Clavio, Jungle Scout, Jungle Scout, Personalization
  10. – 48:55: Event and wedding planners, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles, Meta Ads

Notable quotes from "How I Retired My Wife - Steve Chou"

  • Products every few months, Steve proves that boring, unsexy products with your own manufacturing beat flashy drop shipping every single time. The show starts now. All right…
    about Drop Shipping · at
  • Shoved into it, I started a class, led to a podcast, a YouTube channel, and an annual e-commerce conference called the Seller Summit, which I've run for the last nine years.
    about Annual e-commerce conference · at
  • Looks buff. And so there's this book that I love. It's called Castroizing by Drew Whitman.
    about Drew Whitman · at
  • Sharing that story? Yeah, it was my buddy John Rmpton. He was doing drop shipping of containers like from the container store on Amazon and he had arrangements of all the…
    about The Container Store · at
  • This can take time though. So if you have the budget for this particular product, I would probably run meta ads.
    about Meta Ads · at
  • I like to do is I like to outsource customer service to people in the Philippines. They speak English. The cost of living over there is a lot lower, and you can get a lot more bang for your buck.
    about Philippines · at
  • It with social media posts. We do this with audiobooks. We do this with We just gave it to 11 Labs because I've got hours of me yapping into a mic and the team's Well, maybe 11…
    about 11 Labs · at
  • Marketing. It makes up about 30% of my sales. And in e-commerce land, this email marketing tool I use Clavio can literally be your repeat salesman on autopilot. So, let me just give you an example of what we do with our store.
    about Clavio · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles — Person · 4 mentions · first at
    Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Charles.
  • Steve Cho — Person · 1 mention · first at
    Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Today's guest, Steve Cho, built a six-figure handkerchief business. While…
  • Drew Whitman — Person · 1 mention · first at
  • Leanne Johnson — Person · 1 mention · first at
    And drop shipping and everything is super easy and it'll get done. And I've had one other person, her name is Leanne Johnson. She came in, she's Nope, you're the second person…
  • John Rampton — Person · 1 mention

Books & papers

Companies & orgs

  • Podcast — Company · 3 mentions · first at
    Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Today's guest, Steve Cho, built a six-figure handkerchief business. While others burn through.
  • OnlineJobs.ph — Company · 2 mentions
  • Seller Summit — Company · 1 mention · first at
    To a podcast, a YouTube channel, and an annual e-commerce conference called the Seller Summit, which I've run for the last nine years.
  • The Container Store — Company · 1 mention · first at
  • Fiverr — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Don't think that's an engineer advantage. If you've got access to Fiverr or Upwork or anything, you now have that advantage. especially now with Chad GPT coming out, no offense, your engineer jobs are they're gone. I remember.
  • Upwork — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Don't think that's an engineer advantage. If you've got access to Fiverr or Upwork or anything, you now have that advantage. especially now with Chad GPT coming out, no offense, your engineer jobs are they're gone. I remember.
  • Second Office — Company · 1 mention · first at
    I've had her for I think eight years now. I found her through a company called Second Office. They specialize in e-commerce.
  • Your Tasker — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Employee and you just want like a contractor. There's this company called Your Tasker again for e-commerce where you could just hire them on a project basis.
  • Jungle Scout — Company · 1 mention · first at
    Couple sales that way, you can be pretty confident. U you can also look at tools like Jungle Scout that tell you how well a certain product is selling. And because Amazon owns…
  • ElevenLabs — Company · 1 mention
  • Klaviyo, Inc. — Company · 1 mention
  • Loom, Inc. — Company · 1 mention
  • mywifequitherjob.com — Company · 1 mention
  • Teemu — Company · 1 mention
  • True Classic Tees — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

  • Handkerchiefs — Product · 6 mentions · first at
    Yeah, so mainly I do two things or maybe three things. I run an e-commerce store with my wife. We sell handkerchiefs online, which is really random. We can get into that if you…
  • Meta Ads — Product · 2 mentions · first at
  • 11 Labs — Product · 2 mentions · first at
  • Clavio — Product · 2 mentions · first at
  • Annual e-commerce conference — Product · 1 mention · first at
  • Seller Summit — Product · 1 mention · first at
    To a podcast, a YouTube channel, and an annual e-commerce conference called the Seller Summit, which I've run for the last nine years.
  • Eight Sleep Pod — Product · 1 mention · first at
    If you're all of a sudden Yeah, that's because for example, the eight sleep pod, everyone talked about sleep and all how important it is and I get that. I went out I tried to…
  • Amazon FBA — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Where you can just have your inventory shipped there and they'll take care of the fulfillment and returns. Amazon FBA is like a 3PL if you want to send all your stuff to…
  • Jungle Scout — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Couple sales that way, you can be pretty confident. U you can also look at tools like Jungle Scout that tell you how well a certain product is selling. And because Amazon owns…
  • AI-generated models — Product · 1 mention
  • Klaviyo — Product · 1 mention
  • Loom — Product · 1 mention
  • mywifequitherjob.com Free 6-Day Mini Course — Product · 1 mention

Concepts & topics

Places & events

  • Philippines — Place · 4 mentions · first at
  • Switzerland — Place · 1 mention · first at
    Know tax rate with all included around 47 something% up there. It's it's ridiculous. You can live in Switzerland and it'd be cheaper. It is brutal over there. But we in Florida…
  • United States (states) — Place · 1 mention · first at
    And be part of that because God knows we can't rely on other things in the environment. If you're outside of the United States, maybe you can, but here in the United States, yeah, I think the first step really is to.
  • Asia — Place · 1 mention

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Today's guest, Steve Cho, built a six-figure handkerchief business. While others burn through products every few months, Steve proves that boring, unsexy products with your own manufacturing beat flashy drop shipping every single time. The show starts now. All right, welcome back to the show. Today, we're talking to Steve who has done some amazing things with drop shipping and selling your products online. I've got so much to go into.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Charles. So, you've done a couple things that most people haven't. First off, you're giving things away. You've been doing this for over a decade. Let's get the audience caught up on exactly what you've done and your success rate. Tell me what's going on. What do you do?

Yeah, so mainly I do two things or maybe three things. I run an e-commerce store with my wife. We sell handkerchiefs online, which is really random. We can get into that if you want. Uh but what ended up happening is so I have a masters in electrical engineering uh from Stanford and I was an electrical engineer all my life. That's what I was planning on doing and then my wife threw me for a loop when she said she wanted to quit. And we live in I don't know where you from Charles. Are you in California or

Florida? I'm in Florida. Okay. Here in California it's really expensive. So in order to get a good house and a good school district you pretty much need two incomes. And so that's how we just kind of decided to launch a business so my wife could quit her six-figure job, stay at home with the kids. But what ended up happening was uh we we stumbled upon handkerchiefs because when we first got married, we spent all this money on photography and she she's a crier. Whenever anything happens, I mean, I made her cry for good reasons and bad, but for our wedding, she knew she was going to cry. We looked all over the place for handkerchiefs.

Couldn't find any in the US. Found some in Asia from a factory. We ordered a couple hundred, used a handful of them, sold the rest on eBay, and they sold like hotcakes. So, when it came time to figure out another revenue stream, we got back in touch with those vendors, launched the store, made six figures in profit in our first year. My wife quit her job, and we've been running it for 16 17 years now.

Oh, wow. Then all my Stanford buddies were like, "Okay, I want to quit my job, too. How'd you do it?" So, I just started documenting it on a blog over at mywifequitterjob.com. None of them ended up reading it, but I ended up uh attracting a a random audience of people who wanted to learn how to do this. So, just kind of getting shoved into it, I started a class, led to a podcast, a YouTube channel, and an annual e-commerce conference called the Seller Summit, which I've run for the last nine years.

Oh, wow. Yeah. So, you've been absolutely unsuccessful completely. Glad to hear. Well, well,

I mean, you know how you told me you like to do things on a dare? I do things because I get pressured into it sometimes. Like I had no I didn't want to start a podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess so. Yeah. I guess it is. I really didn't want to start a podcast and you kind of didn't want to. You wanted to be an electric engineer and all of a sudden you're selling handkerchiefs. But whatever gets you there cuz you know Calli's got a you know tax rate with all all included around 47 something% up there. It's it's ridiculous. You can live in Switzerland and it'd be cheaper. It is brutal over there. But we in Florida don't have that level of taxes, but also it's Florida duh for a reason. So it's a little bit different on the back end. It just depends on how long you're here. So walk me through this. There's a different So there's all these things. There's drop shipping. There's affiliate marketing.

There's all this other stuff. You come at this from a very different approach. You're like, "Yeah, we're not going to do that." Your your approach is a little bit different because it's talking about your products. Why is it different? What are you doing differently here?

So once upon a time, maybe if you looked, I don't know, many years ago, like 15 years ago, drop shipping was a little bit more viable. And the reason I say that it was is because it was before Amazon. You had all these manufacturers. They had no idea. They didn't have distribution. They didn't know what to do, right? And so they relied on drop shippers to get their products out there. But once Amazon came out, I mean, Amazon is is got the biggest distribution platform in the US. They own over 50% of e-commerce. So if I'm a manufacturer now, why would I rely on all these little guys, which is kind of a pain in the butt to begin with, or I can just put all my stuff on Amazon, right? and keep a lot more of the profit. And so drop shipping today, especially in light of all the recent events, is pretty much dying unless I would say you sell big ticket items. So I have a couple friends who do okay

selling like barbecue pits or appliances where, you know, you can't really hold inventory for that and you just drop ship from the manufacturer. But traditional drop shipping of lower ticket items, I would say, is is dying if not dead.

Okay. So that grim thanks what grim I guess my next question is I if someone says okay drop shipping is not the answer affiliate marketing's brutal you talk about using your own product like listen this we're going to we're going to talk about and there's a reason for this and I'm not going to steal it from you because you mentioned it before we got on camera tell me why people buy because most people think it's logic based but what's the truth

yeah I mean people just buy based on emotions is what I've discovered and I've been married for over 20 years now. A lot of these fights that we have, they're all emotional. They're not based on logic. So, I stopped trying to reply with logic in general. Same goes with products. So, let me just give you a good example of this. Uh, you can buy t-shirts for probably like a dollar on Teemu today, but I actually get a lot of my shirts from this place called True Classic TE's. Their t-shirts are 29 bucks, just a plain color t-shirt, which is probably like the most commodity product that you could buy. But here's why I spend the 30 bucks. If you watch their commercials, it's like this overweight guy in the beginning wearing like a frumpy t-shirt and then all of a sudden he puts on a true classic tea and all of a sudden he's got biceps, his belly looks flat and everything and he looks buff. And so there's this book

that I love. It's called Castroizing by Drew Whitman. And he states that the reason why people buy anything is due to the life force eight. And one of the life force eight is increased sexual companionship or social approval or just feeling better about yourself. And that's why true classic TE's works. You can get away I so when I said drop shipping was dead.

Just throwing up products that other people are selling is is dying because people comparison shop today. But you can still make drop shipping work. And I still think of it, you can make a couple bucks here and there, but it's temporary money. If you can create compelling ads, you can probably still make some sales, but eventually someone's just going to knock you off.

We mentioned temporary money, and recently I was watching one of your videos online, and you talked about a guy who had for what most people would be a dream, he had a sevenf figureure kind of empire on this drop shipping environment, and he was crushing it, and things radically changed. Do you mind sharing that story? Yeah, it was my buddy John Rmpton. He was doing drop shipping of containers like from the container store on Amazon and he had arrangements of all the suppliers and when an order came in on Amazon, he just sent it off to his supplier and they would fulfill the order and he had a whole bunch of suppliers and he was really killing on Amazon for a while.

One of the other problems with drop shipping though is that fulfillment is out of your control. And when fulfillment is out of your out of your control, anything that your supplier does that's bad actually reflects badly on your reputation. Now on Amazon, this is really important because Amazon has strict requirements. If you do not fulfill your product with this certain time or if you cancel orders, you can get your entire account suspended. So everything was going well for John for a couple years, but then one year, one of his main suppliers had like an inventory glitch. So what ended up happening is he sold a whole bunch of products that he could not fulfill and he had to cancel all them and then Amazon suspended his account. Fine. He got it back like 3 weeks later. So he didn't have income for 3 weeks. He got it back and then a couple months later something similar happened where one of his suppliers

shipped out a whole bunch of orders late and then this time he was suspended for good. I mean it's hard enough to run a business but it's even harder when you're not in control of your own product and your own delivery. Great. Um, I love that. You know, you used to be an engineer and now you're having to completely throw that on your head and now you're doing it off emotions. That's got to make the engineer side of you just go absolutely mad. It's just like, oh god. So, you've already just completely made all of us mad because you just told us what you what we thought would work or let me rephrase that. What social media says, oh, just click three buttons and magically monkeys will fly out of your butt and you'll make a million dollars in 37 seconds. You've done a great job of dispelling that rumor. So, thank you for that. You've probably made a couple people cry. Thank you for that. So, now

that we've recreated the problem as an entrepreneur, let's talk about the solutions. There's a couple things you do. I know you've got an online course that you give away and you've been doing this for a while and we'll get into that later. What I really want to talk about is kind of what are some of the results. How long does it if someone comes in and they kind of do this through I'm just going to call it your method for now. When you go in, you're like, "All right, I'm going to sell my own product. I'm going to sell it off emotions. I have no idea how to do that." which again we'll get into, you know, we're going to go through the step process. Walk me through the end result. What is the normal amount of time where someone says, "Hey, I'm Bob. I just met you.

What's a realistic timeline? What's a realistic energy effort? What is a, you know, what my financial outlay is going to be? If my goal is to make 150,000 a year, I don't know, just a random number. What profit?" Because I only talk in I only talk in nets. I don't talk.

So, this is a tough question to answer because everyone works at a different pace. I'll give you two, you know, kind of disparate end points. So, one of my best students managed to launch a product in just three months, made 25,000 in their first month, and then $100,000 four months later during the holiday season.

Is that gross or net? This is gross. Gross. Do you know what the typical margins are around 30-ish% 30 to 35% in e-commerce? So, do the math yourself. I don't do public math. Um, that is probably not the norm. I would say most people who join my class, there's a learning curve, right? You're drinking from a fire hose in the beginning. So, I would say at least a year is generally what I tell people.

Gotcha. And what is realistically how much what's the average or the mean that most people are making?

Yeah. So, of my students, if you if you launch a product and stick with me for a year, you're you're making at least four figures a month. Like 60% of my people make at least four figures per month and around 10 10% of people are doing over $50,000 a month. Again,

gotcha. It just depends. You know, those other 30% of the people that don't do well, most of those don't even launch a product. And there's a lot of mental aspects we can talk about too about not starting and that sort of thing, but

absolutely. Yeah. So, let's get into that. Let's, you know, because there's, you know, we talk about this all the time and I I wrote about it that there's three lies. The lies of what, the lies of how, and the lies of why. three wides that you're lies that you're told and they don't work in any way, shape, or form. And so this one is the lie of what? If I knew what to do, I would do it. No, you won't. You won't. You got access to an iPhone. You got access to the internet. You have access to everything. You literally could build NASA's spaceships if you want to. If you had the resources, the knowledge is out there.

You're not doing it. For your experience, what are the things that are stopping people? What are the emotional and mental blocks that people are running into? And do you have ways to overcome them? So, this is really funny, but my worst students in my class are engineers. And the reason why is because engineers want to have all the analysis done before they get started. And they tend to be very pessimistic in nature. They think of everything that could go wrong and that prevents them from getting started.

Yes. Right. Instead of thinking, hey, what are all the good things that could happen to change your life? And the problem with people, I think, in general is that they're really bad at calculating the probability of something failing. So, you know, this is the funny thing. The people that do better in my class actually don't think, they just do,

right? And it's interesting you say that. Rocket science. Yeah. Sorry. Go on. Yeah. The most successful entrepreneurs I know have autism and asper. They have those two things because not only do they not think in that way, they also don't feel. They just execute. They're the best executors I've ever met. They're some of the best high frequency traders I know are way on the spectrum and they're doing seven figures. And I'm like, what the how are you doing this? Because they're just going. It's just it's an algorithm to them. They're just working the system. So, yeah, I agree with you. It just did just do. So, keep going. Sorry about that.

And more importantly, I think they're just too dumb to quit. Uh, let me tell you, when I first got started in this, I was like,

all the engineers underneath the bus. Selling handkerchiefs is dumb, right? like I don't even like the product when we first started. It just happened to be a problem that we had. So, we decided to solve it. And I when I first got started, I was following a bunch of gurus. And I was thinking to myself, how hard could this possibly be? You just buy something low and you sell it at a higher price and you keep the profit. And I didn't discover all the subtleties until well I was into it. But the fact that I was dumb about it in the beginning allowed me to get started and kind of follow through. And because I'm an engineer, like I like solving problems. So you just kind of solve them as they arrive. And all my init I had like a really good game plan when I first got started went out the window in like the first month.

You just cannot predict what's going to happen. Yeah. So what are the things that like how to overcome those mental hurdles because that's all they are. They're temporary inconveniences and and people think oh the only way to succeed to s the only way to have success is to seed succeed. And I'm like, nope, you're going to have to fail as fast as you possibly can and just run into it full tilt. A lot of people can't do that, right? They think, hey, I'm going to start an e-commerce solution. I'm going to create this. I'm going to do drop and it's going to replace my income and it's going to be monopoly money and all of a sudden I'm going to be making six, seven figures. I love that you're coming through authentically and like, no, you're not.

You're you're going to make four in the first year and then from there it just a lot of it depends on you. How does someone get past that first step of stagnancy of the inaction? How does someone normally get by that? So I think the first thing is to set the proper expectations. Problem with YouTube and Facebook, you see ads of all these people making killer money allegedly in like 3 months or less. And guess what? When you get started and that's in your mindset, 3 months will pass by. You're not going to hit those goals and you're going to want to give up. So my first mindset that I tell myself is I'm going to run this business for at least 3 to 5 years and I'm not going to stop. It's a big commitment, but that way you have the, you know, the mental capacity to just follow through with something.

Uh, the other thing that I like to do, and this doesn't always work for other people, but I play like the worst case scenario game. So, what's the worst thing that can happen if you fail? And as I mentioned before, a lot of people over overblow this part, right? For me, like if my handkerchief store failed, wasn't a big deal. My wife would just go back to work, right? Let's say we risked a lot of money on inventory and we failed. Worst case scenario, I suck it up and I move back in with my parents for for a little bit. Nothing's the end of the world.

Or you're an engineer. Yes. I Yeah, exactly. Engineer again. Yeah, exactly. Worst case stuck being an engineer again. You're like,

which could those are two things. Here's the other thing that's very important, too. I think you have to have a purpose, right? If you're just doing this just for the sake of making money, you'll fall into this trap that I hit in just a little bit. But the reason why I was able to follow through was because I wanted to stay at home with the kids. Like that was my goal. My goal was never to just make like a bajillion dollars or whatnot. I just wanted enough so that I didn't have to go into the office. My wife didn't have to go in the office and we could basically spend time with whoever we wanted to. And when you have those boundaries, uh it's a lot easier to just get yourself off your butt.

Contrast that to an engineer in the Silicon Valley doing 250 300K. I have some students like that in my class. They're kind of working a cushy job. They already have like a good place, a car, whatnot. They're kind of content, you know, again, they don't want to work, but there's no sense of urgency for them to follow through on this. So,

so one of the things that decided that pivoted me because I grew up p I couldn't afford the last few letters of poor. My initial push was I got on a plane and I looked and I saw business class and I was like, I'm never sitting back there again. I'm a big guy. The seat sits stops here. I'm six feet tall. I got broad shoulders. I don't fit in a normal seat. So that was the first push. And the second push was I was working in a hospice. I was watching people die. And there was a sense of urgency going, "Wow, this is a small clock. The amount of time I'm on this planet is very short." So that sense of urgency of having some sort of control over my life was huge. And I think a lot of people that are listening to this that are trying to scale their businesses because art starting's easy. That's just anybody can start or say they're going to start implementing it and scaling getting past the failures getting past the hey I

haven't made money in the first three six months of this or hey I'm at six figures a year how do I get to seven I'm at seven how do I get to eight it's a completely different narrative it's a completely different conversation which is why we're focusing on scaling so if someone's coming into this and they've already got past it and they've got their purpose and they're like okay this is why I'm doing it I'm going to commit to this for the next 3 to 5 years and my my my purpose is so that I have enough handkerchiefs in the house because my wife is sad that I'm an engineer here and I'm crying the whole time. What are the things that I can do? How do we start? What is the steps? If you're looking through this and you want to kind of on a on a zoomed out level say, "Hey, this is what your year is going to look like." And we're going to go through a little bit of it, but realistically, this is your first

quarter, your second quarter, you know, this is how we're going to break this down. If someone wants to get into this because it's not drop shipping and it's a very different ballgame, what are the things that they're going to go through? what does their first 12 months look like to actually execute on this so that they can ultimately stay home and be there with their kids? Because for me, that's a huge reason to be able to be home with your kids and educate them and and be part of that because God knows we can't rely on other things in the environment. If you're outside of the United States, maybe you can, but here in the United States,

yeah, I think the first step really is to figure out where you're going to sell. And

how does one do? The way I teach it is uh a lot of people come in clueless and there's tools out there that'll tell you, you know, how much every product is making on Amazon and it'll make suggestions. I think the problem with those suggestions though are that if everyone a lot of people are using this tool, they're going to come up with the same suggestions. So, what I usually advise is that you sell something that you have some sort of unfair advantage with, right? Uh, let me give you an example. One of the students in my class, uh, he wanted to sell apparel and I spent, so we did a one-on-one consult and I spent probably like 75% of the time talking him out of selling apparel. It's a commodity item.

He didn't really have any good value props and whatnot. So, I was trying to talk him out of it. And then at the end, in like the last 5 minutes, he goes, "Oh, by the way, uh, my parents have a factory in India where I can get this stuff for super cheap." And I was like, "Okay, you're going to sell apparel. We just need to figure out what type of apparel you gonna sell now. Stupid stuff like that happens all the time. Uh

they make Advil for those days. I've been in that environment. We're like, "Oh yeah, why isn't I getting along with my wife? Oh, I haven't talked to her in six months. I used to be in it." They're like, "The printer won't print. Does it have paper?" No. So, yeah, I get it. You have those days. So, they have to identify what they're doing. And if their family doesn't have um a textile mill or a fac manufacturing and obviously it's not the tools online because it's going to give the canned answers to everybody else. What are the things that you know when you sit down you're looking for that competitive advantage? If you're just some guy living in a in the city in a in a one- one, you know, twotory Dorito bag, what is the things that they can look at going, "All right, how do I give my competitive advantage? Is it based off what you know about hobbies? Is it based off what your interests are? what are

the things that they're going to break down and kind of get into it? So, I wouldn't necessarily go with your interest per se, but maybe something that you're really knowledgeable about where you actually know what problems people face, right?

And uh and just to solve your own problems often times are the best students in my class. So, I have a student who's really successful. Um she likes crossstitching, so she decided to sell her own crossstitch kits. Uh, I have another student in my class who hates wearing high heels. So, she came up with the product so that she could wear high heels longer without the pain. So, scratching your own itch can often be the best way to go. Um, but let's say you're not creative at all, right? Often times you Yeah, same here. Same here.

Handkerchiefs. I came with handkerchiefs, right? Oftentimes you can actually go on for products that you buy, look at the negative reviews, see what people are complaining about and just improve upon that product and release a better version.

Pretty straightforward. If you're all of a sudden Yeah, that's because you know, for example, the eight sleep pod, everyone talked about sleep and and all how important it is and I I get that. I went out I tried to get eight sleep and I put it on my bed and it's a for those of you who don't know it's a water cooled mattress topper that has a can container device in there and it regulates and it reads your body temperature and it reads your HRV and all that and it's about five grand plus they have the monthly thing and it was horrible. Absolutely horrible. Turned my bed into a rock. I wasn't a fan. I've got friends that love it. For me I didn't like it at all. I found a resource that works magnificently for me. It's like 150 bucks and it just cured my insomnia. I went from sleeping four hours a night to over seven within two days and I love the darn thing. So I think that would be one of those examples if and correct me

if I'm wrong. If I was sitting in your course, I'd be like, "Okay, I found this product that I like this sleepy thing. Now it's trying to find a way to rebrand it. Is that my next step or what is my next step if I was going to do something like that?"

I think the problem with rebranding it though is that that other company already sells it, right? And if you're just selling someone else's product, in the long run, there'll probably going to be other vendors selling that same product. And it always just generally leads to a price spiral down to whatever the MAP pricing is for that product, right? So, let's say that other product didn't exist. Let's just hypothetically say, and you didn't like your aid sleep, but you were like, "Hey, what if I make a softer version of this aid sleep and sell it under my my own for half the price or less than half the price? I can't remember how much aid sleep costs.

It was expensive from what I remember. Yeah. About five grand. Yeah. Five grand. Yeah. Yeah. So onetenth the cost, right? Or whatever.

That would be very compelling. Or if there's something that you like about your $150 product that you might want to change up and make it even better.

There is. There is. And I suppose that if it's onetenth the price, it can't be as well constructed as the eightle model.

Just hypothet Yeah. Yeah. It's not. I mean, there's a lot about it that I don't like. For example, um, and I'm just using as an example for people to understand cuz I want to brainstorm this with you because a lot of people don't have access to you like this. So, again, I'm not selling this. So, hear me out, but like the cables aren't long enough and it has to be elevated and it's a little noisy and the remote sucks. So, if I'm in that, I'm like, okay, I've got this product that I would love to have optimized. I would like to get it better. Where does one go and look into saying, how do I go manufacture differently? cuz I don't have a family in India that is a manufacturer for me. What what are those are there steps there that how do you know a good manufacturer versus a bad manufacturer? How do we do those things?

Yeah. So for most people who aren't willing to travel, probably the easiest way is just look on Alibaba. It's just a directory of suppliers in Asia that are willing to make whatever you want. Now, if you were to do this, if you were to make this product, uh, one of the great things about Alibaba is that they'll send in third party inspectors in to actually view the facilities and give you a report. So, for example, let's say you don't want any child labor in any of the factories that you want to use. There's certifications that you can look for for that. Okay? So, you go on there, you click verified supplier, and then you look for sleep mattress or something like that and find something that's kind of close to what you want to make. It could be like, you know, an eight sleep clone or something like that. And then you work with them to make the changes to whatever you want to make.

So, I've gone through this process. I've decided I'm going to sell things based off of emotion. I'm going to try and fix a problem even if I don't have the resources to do it myself because I don't have my own. I've found a vendor that doesn't employ Oompa Loompas or children. I would be excited about Oompa Loompas though, just because that would be fun. and the ones I grew up watching, not the new versions cuz no, but I go into that environment, I create it. Now I've got the next hurdle, which is how do I penetrate a market? How do I market as a whole? How do I put things together so that people k so no like and trust?

Because we talked about this before. People don't buy products and services. They buy stories, identities, and ways out of pain.

You know, we talked about the book you were sharing earlier. Now all of a sudden, I'm going in there and I want to market this. How do I do this in a way? And before I do any of this, should I look at having some sort of realistic budget on, hey, it's going to cost me I'm doing this for three to five years based off what what you're telling me to do. I need to have some sort of budget. What is the realistic costs and reserves of capital that I need to have for this launch for to be able to sustain myself, not even to make a profit, but normally just to survive this ball game.

So, I think it depends on which advertising avenue or marketing avenue that you're going to choose, right? When we first started out, we did not have the budget for anything except for content marketing. Fortunately, today it's easier than ever to do a lot of this stuff for free using short form video on Tik Tok and Instagram. And we were talking about emotions for sleep. It'd be so easy. Uh I think you threw me a softball here, right? You could have like a wife who's grumpy all the time and then all of a sudden the husband buys this thing, she's sleeping well and all of a sudden she's in a great mood all the time, you know, just little pieces of content, little skits like that uh to just kind of market your product and get get the idea of what some of the effects are of your product.

And over time, you know, one of these is bound to go viral if you if you produce content every day. And when it does, people will just naturally Google whatever your brand is and find your product.

Yeah. All right. So then this can take time though. So if you have the budget uh for this particular product, I would probably run meta ads.

Same thing, right? You're targeting someone's emotions in a video. They're going to click on it. You have a really nice landing page. You can generate some immediate sales. And your goal with that would be to just try to break even or make a tiny bit of profit on whatever ads that you're running. And the idea here is each time you make a sale, you're going to be gathering email addresses. And the goal here is hopefully you have some accessories that you can upsell or whatnot because once you have that email list, you can sell a lot to the people who bought from you already and create another revenue stream there while still building up your brand with content.

So once you get through this and you've given me a lot of stuff to go through. Let's say magically we've broken through this point. We've got momentum. We're selling things. I've got a distributor. Um I've already got a profit loss center. I've already got some returns coming in. I've got I'm basically moving.

Mhm. We now need to scale because we're not selling myself as a product, which is the number one thing people mess up with when with scaling. They think, you know, if you are the product and you don't own a business, you've created a prison. I now have this. What are the tools that you look at saying, "Okay, I'm making four figures. I need to make six figures a month or I need to make five figures a month. I need to be in that 50 to $100,000 a month of gross profit in order to create a net profit of that low fives in order to survive and go forward. What are the tools that you found that increase your scalability and your automation? Because we talk about this all the time about systems are the way to create freedom." Yep. Just systems set you free. What are the tools that you found that you've used and your students have used over the because you've been doing this what a decade now?

Over a decade. Too long. Too long actually. Too long. We're getting old. It happens. You you you got my Oompa Loompa reference. So, yeah, we're already old. So, what are the tools that you found that are really really helpful for you?

Yeah. So, I I I think um let's talk about e-commerce specific ones as well as just some general principles on ecom in e-commerce land. Typically, your the bulk of your work is going to be just moving products around. So, if you want to scale, you ideally aren't doing the fulfillment. So, there are 3PLs. They stand for third party logistics houses where you can just have your inventory shipped there and they'll take care of the fulfillment and returns. Amazon FBA is like a 3PL if you want to send all your stuff to Amazon. Okay. Uh the next thing that's usually a hassle is customer service. So, uh, one thing that I like to do is I like to outsource customer service to people in the Philippines. They speak English. The cost of living over there is a lot lower, and you can get a lot more bang for your buck.

Now, on the operations side, here's how I often do it. I look at what's going on on a day-to-day basis, and I just look for a lot of repetitive tasks. So, let me give you an example. We do personalization in our store. So people can, you know, monogram whatever they want on their handkerchief. And typically the way it works is they they monogram, they select something on the website, they make a purchase, and then you got to create this file that the sewing machine understands, but obviously the website isn't connected to the sewing machine. So, back in the day when we first launched this, there was a person whose only job was to prepare these files for the sewing machine. Cut and paste from the website to the sewing machine. So, I'm an engineer, so I I guess I have an advantage in this. So, I just wrote a little program that literally takes what's on the web page and automatically generates these uh you

know, these programs for the sewing machine. And that eliminated one person's job right off the bat. And I don't think that's an engineer advantage. If you've got access to Fiverr or Upwork or anything, you now have that advantage. You know, especially now with Chad GPT coming out, no offense, your engineer jobs are they're gone. I remember

almost Yeah, I agree with you now. Yeah. Um it's funny that you say that in Silicon Valley, a lot of my buddies are not hiring college grads anymore because chatbt can code. They're relying less on new new people. I I don't know if that's good or I remember when

it it's a it's a good thing you know cuz it's forcing the change. I'm a huge fan of AI. I think it's I think it's wonderful. It's just like when the you know we've had these revolutions. We have the technological revolution. We've had the we're having the AI revolution. We've gone from farmland. We've had these huge revolutions and the jobs that most people have they're going away.

Yeah. But new jobs are going to be created. When I was in college, the idea of being a network admin or network engineer, no one even thought of that. To be a web developer or a UX, you know, an U expert, user experience expert, no one thought of that. So things are starting to change. I remember in the early 2000s, we were getting paid5 to $10,000 to create a website. And I figured out really quickly I could outsource it to someone for a couple hundred bucks. Now you can do it for free. Just go click click click and you have a full website.

That's going to happen with anything that can be automated because people like um Steve are out there and they're bastards because they're engineers and they're going to figure out how to automate these things and that's just the reality. So if you don't know how to do these and you don't understand how to code, you don't have to. That game's over. You know, everything that we do, you were talking about, you know, people from the Philippines. The person who makes all of this possible, hi Christine, is the one who does that.

She's based out of the Philippines. And without her, none of what I do is operational. book that you people rip on me. How did you write a book in nine days? I'm like, well, I threw up on a screen and I gave it to Christine and she cleaned it up. Now I we just did a new one which the AI cleaned it all up for us and it took 5 minutes. I literally went and made a sandwich and came back and that was it. It was super easy to do that. So yes, things are changing and if you can master this tool, you will have a job. If not, well, you can't even work at McDonald's anymore because that's going to be automated as well. So,

how much is Charles paying you? I I'll pay you double just if you're listening to this uh right now.

Not gonna happen. You could try. People tried to poach her for years. Actually, this happened uh two three days ago. So, we tried to poach her. I love that woman. She's like a little She's family to me. So, no, you can't have Christine. She's a gift. I wish I could make more Christines. Someone invent cloning. I need more Christines. She's a She's a gift.

Let me tell you something that I'm using right now that has saved a lot of time also. And this doesn't really affect the example that we gave here, but we sell aprons. And previously, you'd have to get models. You have to do a photo shoot. Now, you can just literally have AI generate the models wearing your merchandise. And it looks really good. You don't need to hire models anymore. So,

my favorite one is 11 Labs. Yeah, it's my it's my favorite automation tool. We were just talking about this. For anybody who listens to the show, the pre and the post, that's not me. Unless you see my face and me yapping, it's not me talking. And we do it with social media posts. We do this with audiobooks. We do this with We just gave it to 11 Labs because I've got hours of me yapping into a mic and the team's like, "Well, maybe 11 Labs can learn." And it's not perfect, but good god is it faster. And the ability to create content because my voice is such my brand. We now can create this viral content leveraging 11 Labs. And we used to have someone on the team who edited these things and did these things just like you used to have someone who used to code it in for your sewing machines.

and that person need a new job. That's going to continue to happen. So, in some ways it's really good.

In some ways it's going to force you to change. And it's one of the three rules in life is you've got to change. Paradox, humor, and change. Those are the three rules.

Yep. So, if someone comes in and they're going, "All right, this is not what anyone else is telling me. Everyone else is telling me that affiliate marketing and drop shipping and everything is super easy and it'll get done." And I've had one other person, her name is Leanne Johnson. She came in, she's like, "Nope, you're the second person who comes in authentically." And we try and track down individuals who are authentic and are proving this over and over again that you're going to have to do this a different way. You've shown us a very different way. What is the normal experience though when someone walks into this as far as because we get the idea now, right? We get it. You got to find your own unique product. You got to find, you know, unique problem. You've got to kind of put this together. We kind of go through this. What is the time allocation when someone does this?

What does this normally feel like for someone? What are they walking into? And would you recommend this to someone who, you know, do they quit their job? Do they not quit their job? If they're a single mom, what do they do? If they're a kid who's 14 years old, can they do it? What is the spectrum of say, you know what, if someone had a, you know, a gun to my head and I had to, you know, supply for my kid and provide for my family, would you do this or would you do something else? Okay. So, number one, you asked a lot of questions in that in that outburst there, but uh number one, I would never quit the job. Uh you never want to be running a business worried about skimping on things and whatnot.

So, it's hard enough as it is. You don't want stress to be another factor involved. So, all this stuff can be perfectly done on the side. Like, we we created all of our businesses on the side. And as people, we waste a lot of time, right? So all I had to do is I cut out TV and I cut out going out with friends on like one night of the weekends and we just worked in. If you want something bad enough, you'll find the time to do it. Now, in terms of time allocation specifically for e-commerce, the work is bursty. So in the beginning when you're trying to figure out what you want to sell and finding suppliers and whatnot, that's going to take a lot of time. But then there's this downtime of like two or 3 months where your stuff's getting made and you know you're going to figure out how to market your site and whatnot but it's a little bit more lax and then when your product comes back then it

gets busy again right so the work is kind of bursty and in the beginning it's going to be a lot more work because you got to set up all your systems and your processes and whatnot but in steady state like today I work about 20 hours a week running out 20 hours a week running all my businesses once it's at steady state and you have the systems in can get easy. So, I don't know if that answers your question. A lot of upfront work. Yeah.

But since I'm a systems guy and you and I both have kind of a geek background because you're an engineer and I'm an IT guy. I immediately go to systems. What can I how can I implement a system into this? Is there a way to do what you're doing purely with VAS? In other words, hey, I've got this idea. I want to sell XYZ, some widget, whatever it is. How much of this do you actually have to be involved in if you've got the budget to outsource it to a VA? Can you hire a team of VAS, the Christines of the planet, which I wish there was more.

There's only one. It breaks my heart. But for those of the planet, are there a is there a way that you're like, "Yeah, absolutely. You can do this or you know, no, you got to be involved. You got to be sweating. You know, got to put in the sweat in the blood."

So, you absolutely can. In fact, there are entire companies devoted to training VAS in e-commerce in the Philippines that already know all the tasks. That's generally not how I roll, though. I I like to do everything myself in the beginning so I understand what the problems are and that way when I outsource it, I can have them do it the way that I want it done. And I typically just use a tool called Loom. I don't know if you're familiar with It's just a way to just record your and I just put together these SOPs on Loom and then I just train them and it takes longer this way, but at least I know what I'm outsourcing.

What are some of the companies that are there any of the companies that do train these people throughout the Philippines? And good god, we're promoting the Philippines. They should contact us. Um, so I just I don't speak I think it's called Tagala. I don't speak Tagala.

Tagalague. It's it's a language. They all speak English over there. So maybe they do. They're amazing. But it's funny because again Christine's getting talked about a lot this episode. Her her ability to grasp the English language is light years better than I am because I'm a classic American. I can barely speak and everyone's like, "Oh, you're a writer." I'm like, "No, I'm an author. It's a very different conversation. I can't spell and my grammar is horrible." Hers is light years better than me.

Huh. And it made it more impressive when I heard her speak her native tongue because it's not even close. It's not even the same. They're not even close. The roots are not the same.

But is there a company, and again, we're not sponsored by anybody. Is there a company that you're like, "Yeah, you know what? This one, if I was going to do it that way, I would look at XYZ company." Or if you're like, "You know what? You're killing your success rates. Don't do it that way."

So, this VA that's been with me for I I shouldn't call her. She's She's like my confidant at this point. I think VA would be an insult.

Uh I I've had her for I think eight years now. I found her through a company called Second Office. They specialize in e-commerce. And the beauty of it is you you pay an extra fee. They they provide an office and everything and they they hold her accountable, you know, for coming in and whatnot. But after a year, you have the option of hiring her directly. And then I whoever your person is directly and then you can hire them. Uh another place that I go to is online jobs.ph. This is how I found all my customer service people. I'm sure you're familiar with that service. Um there's another service if you don't want to hire them as an employee and you just want like a contractor. There's this company called Your Tasker again for e-commerce where you could just hire them on a project basis.

Gotcha. So, if you're going to find out, let's say you want to sell mice and you're like, I got a better way to make mice. I'm going to make them fluffy and they're going to squirt out slurpies. Whatever your idea is, God bless you. And you're like, hey, I need to find out if this is a viable product. I need to figure out this is going to work. I need to find the wholesalers. I need to do that, but I don't know anything about this. And I've got three kids. I'm working six jobs, you know, whatever it is. Is there a way to say, "Listen, all right, Steve, can I just hire you to do that?" Or would you say, "Hey, that's not how I roll. Go to this company, hire this one person for a little while, see if it if it's viable, and then get back to me." Or what would you recommend?

Because I know you offer the ability that you work with people because then there's also then just entrepreneurs like me who just want to systematize everything because I like doing that.

Are you asking me personally or are you do you want me to give a method of validating either I'm asking what you would do it that you would trust that you would stand behind because that's the whole reason we had you on here is that you're authentic.

I I think for validation you should do that yourself and typically the way it the way it works is you'll get some samples made of whatever you want to sell. And the easiest way to just give yourself confidence to place that bulk order is to just to try to sell those samples. I mean, just list them on eBay or any marketplace and if you can get a couple sales that way, you can be pretty confident. U you can also look at tools like Jungle Scout that tell you how well a certain product is selling. And because Amazon owns 50% of e-commerce, if it's selling on that platform, you can probably suspect there's going to be a demand for what you have to sell. And at that point, you should feel confident placing that order.

All right. What are the, you know, a lot of people are going to be afraid because like my my it's going to be returned a lot. How do you handle that? How do you handle gosh, my product, I'm just creating it. It's new to market. I'm going to deal with these returns. How do you deal with that situation?

Well, for our store, we do personalization and there's no returns on on that merchandise. But I would say even for the non-personalized merchandise, our return rate is super low. I think the only reason, again, it's going to depend on what you sell. If you sell apparel, the return rate is like 20% plus. But for most things that don't require sizing and whatnot, return rate is typically pretty low. Like ours is like a fraction of a percent. It's not going to be a factor. So don't worry about it.

So for me, as you go through this and you're and you're and you're putting together this whole formula, there are things and there are tools that you use on a daily basis that may not be involved with this. And I always ask everybody who's an entrepreneur, what are the tools that you use? You talked about Loom, which I don't understand how people function without Loom. I'm on Loom multiple times a day. It's how I communicate with my staff. What are some other tools that you use? I like, God, I wish I knew about this earlier be for what it is because it helps me scale.

I think any email marketing and SF SMS marketing tool is essential. Here's the amazing thing about email marketing. It makes up about 30% of my sales. And in e-commerce land, this email marketing tool I I use Clavio can literally be your repeat salesman on autopilot. So, let me just give you an example of what we do with our store. So, we sell matching napkins in our store, dinner napkins, tea napkins, and cocktail napkins. So, if someone buys a cocktail napkin, but not the matching dinner napkin, this email marketing tool will know that and it will automatically try to cross-ell them the matching napkins.

So you can set it all up once. Set it and forget it. You set up once. So if they bought this but not that, you send this email there.

And so it's like a virtual salesman for you. And what was it called again? Clavio.

Clavio. Jesus. Okay. So now the next question is marketing, right? Because people have to learn how to market in a specific way. It's telling that story, putting them in there, and having that arc and and and getting it through there.

There's lots of different ways to do campaigns. There's nurturing campaigns. There Seinfeld campaigns. There's a lot of different campaign strategies. What strategies have you found for the e-commerce space that are just bulletproof and they work better than really anything else?

Yeah. So, for the longest time, we relied on search engine optimization. We put out like craft guides and content so that brides could do do a lot of DIY stuff and that drove a lot of the traffic and sales. I I would say that in e-commerce, all you really need is one good traffic source to hit six figures and maybe two to hit seven figures and beyond. So, you just got to you just got to pick the traffic source that matches whatever you're selling. And it just so happens that our search terms were pretty easy to rank for. Got

um I I can you repeat your question again regarding the marketing? So, yeah. Yeah. So, I'm trying to figure out, you know, there's there's ways to grow. There's way ways to get reach. And you talk about the the way to build an audience. There's four ways to get an audience.

Yeah. You build it, you borrow it, you beg for it, or you buy it, right? And that's really the the four ways to do it. And in there, there's very specific strategies to do this outreach, for do this email marketing or marketing as a whole. There's different campaign strategies. What are the strategies that you found that have been the most effective for scaling across your clients and even some of your students that work with you?

Yeah. So if you look holistically, so we rely on SEO and meta ads and then a lot of repeat business. Uh so one thing that we do is um we actually did this analysis several years ago where we looked at our customer base and our average order value is about 60 bucks and we noticed that 50% of our customers spend like half of our AOV and only 10% of our customers spend 120 bucks or double our AOV. But if you look at that from a revenue perspective, we found that those 10% of customers who spend double our AOV were generating 50% of our revenues, whereas the bulk of our customers, our cheapy guys, spending less than half of our AOV, were only representing about 10% of our our revenues. So that's when we started focusing a lot on just getting those big whales to spend more money. And for our store, it turned out that they were event and wedding planners. So today, whenever we get a large order, like uh

someone orders like 40 dozen napkins or something like that, we call them up and we say, "Hey, we noticed you bought a crap ton of linens. Uh do you happen to be an event planner?" And if yes, we say, "Hey, here's a coupon code for you. Here's a dedicated rep from our company that will handle all your orders and make sure they get to where they are on time." And once you do that, you get a person who buys from you consistently and in large quantities. Uh, another thing.

So, how do you I mean, there's no there's a ton of things we can talk about. I don't know how much time we have left, but uh so I was about to say so I mean there's so much value here. There's so many things that we we can talk about and you have an entire course over this. You've got so much stuff. You have a you give away a course. Tell me more about this course that you give away. Yeah. So, the course is meant for total beginners and it mainly focuses on the first step which is finding a product to sell that's going to be profitable, validating it and then finding suppliers. And then one thing that I like to do and it's funny we talked about websites. I give them a free template so they can end that miniourse with a website ready to go without hiring a designer which what I found over the years is one of people's biggest hurdles in even getting started in this. So,

and where speaking of websites, how do they find you? Where's the best way? People are like, "Jesus, you know, I just listened to Steve. He's completely changed how I view e-commerce as a as a human being. How do I find them? Where do I track them down? Where do I get more information? Where do I get this free course? What's going on? How do I do that? Where can they find you?"

Yeah. The easiest place to go is mywifequit herjob.com. And on there, there'll be a link right there. You can sign up for my free 6-day miniourse. I came up with that title because that's how this whole thing started. So

because you're an engineer, it just made sense to you. It's like, what are we going to name it? This. I'd love that you take this very practical approach. So if people wanted to get the course, they go there. If they want to get access to you, what's the best way to get access to you and and pull more information in?

Probably just send me an email over at stevemywifequitterjob.com. I love that you make it very complicated. So I appreciate it. We could probably talk for another 3 4 hours just on this and pick your brain on it. I love that you gave tangible things. I really appreciate you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me, Charles. Success isn't found in shortcuts or get-rich quick schemes. It's built through solving real problems, understanding your customers emotions, and committing to the long game. Stop chasing shiny objects and start building something that actually adds value to people's lives.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "How I Retired My Wife - Steve Chou"?

In order: 0:00 Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, Podcast, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles; 5:00 Drop Shipping, Drew Whitman, The Container Store; 10:00 Handkerchiefs; 15:00 Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, United States (states); 20:00 Eight Sleep Pod, Handkerchiefs; 25:00 Amazon FBA, Content Marketing, Meta Ads, Personalization; 30:00 11 Labs, Drop Shipping, Fiverr, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles; 35:00 Philippines, Second Office; 40:00 Clavio, Jungle Scout, Jungle Scout, Personalization; 45:00 Event and wedding planners, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles, Meta Ads.

What is mentioned in this The Proven Podcast episode?

53 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Drop Shipping, Handkerchiefs, Jeffrey 71st – Miller, Charles, Philippines, Podcast, Meta Ads. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How I Retired My Wife - Steve Chou"?

The episode runs 49 min; the transcript is about 10,727 words in 116 timestamped sections.

More from The Proven Podcast

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated November 19, 2025.