Editor:
Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Lisa Somers, the CEO at Marketplace SuperHeroes. Lisa leads the charge of this innovative platform that empowers entrepreneurs globally to build and scale their businesses through Amazon. I’m excited for this because Lisa will shed light on what Marketplace SuperHeroes is, why it’s a game changer for anyone looking to enter the e-commerce space and how their support makes the Amazon platform accessible and less daunting for new sellers. So Lisa, welcome.
Lisa Somers:
Thank you so much. Really delighted to be here and chat all about all things’ internet marketing and Amazon.
Editor:
Well, we are really pleased to have you, so thank you. Could you start maybe by telling us a little bit about your background and what your role is at marketplace SuperHeroes?
Lisa Somers:
Absolutely. So I am CEO of Marketplace SuperHeroes, and the company was founded in, I believe, 2014 by my brother actually. So that’s a whole topic we can possibly get into about working with your siblings.
But it was founded then, and I came along a little bit later because I was actually studying to be a psychologist and I thought I was going to have a very corporate career as a clinical psychologist or something along those lines.
And I was studying, and actually I found that a lot of what I had hoped psychology would be and that career would be, it wasn’t really, it was very, you have to exist within the system and you have to do things a certain way.
And I was never very good at that. Even in school I was always the annoying kid with her hand up for every question or just blurting out the answer. So I wasn’t existing very well within those systems. And at the time, my brother, Stephen, had started this little course, as we used to call it back then because he was an Amazon seller himself, and he identified that there wasn’t really anyone providing good education in that space back then.
Certainly not for people outside of the US and he was obviously based in Ireland where we’re from. So he started a course with his then business partner at the time.
And then I came along a little bit later as a customer support representative, would you believe? Because I wanted to see what was going on over there. Was it going to be something that could give me a bit of pocket money while I was a broke student studying as a psychologist. And then after that, it was a case of I was looking around the business and I was spotting lots of opportunities for reducing the chaos, I would say. And anybody who’s in an early stage course coaching business probably knows what that chaos is like. You’re just launching things whenever you feel like it the day before. No one on your team really knows what they’re doing.
You don’t even really have a big team.
And there was lots of things that were just not really working that well. And so I sort of took it upon myself to try and fix some of these glaring issues. And that was how I began my, I was going to say my ascent, which sounds like I became royalty or something. It wasn’t quite that fancy, but that was sort of how I began moving up through the company until eventually now I run the business.
Editor:
So the company was launched, as you say in 2014, is that right? And then when did you come on board? How quickly after it was created did you start?
Lisa Somers:
It was about 2016. It really only got going in 2015, I would say. There was a small number of clients we had and it wasn’t very big. I remember my brother was actually, he would be cold calling people on the phone, “Hey, do you want to learn how to sell on Amazon? We’ve got a course.” We didn’t have all of the funnels and all of the say joint ventures and things like that that we have now. So it was very bootstrapped and very basic at the time because we were learning. So I came along at the start and I began reading Russell Brunson’s books, the DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets, all the OGs, we’ll know those.
And I was also reading a lot of MJ DeMarco books, so all about Millionaire Fastlane and trying to understand, “Oh, I don’t have to have a nine to five, I don’t have to have a traditional job. We can build something that is very different and allows us to create freedom in our lives.” I travel around the world with my partner now, and the only reason I can do that is because I don’t have to ask for time off because I work for myself. So I think it was a case of just getting stuck into learning about marketing obviously.
And then also for me, because I knew I was someone who could organize things and make sure the team were all pulling in the right direction and building a team in the first place, then I got really into leadership and operations and all of those topics. And so I went on a deep dive of studying all of those things in order to help us grow the business and that’s been the journey we’ve been on ever since.
Editor:
So here we are now 11 years since the company was founded, maybe 10 years since it started to find its feet and become what it’s become today. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about that journey and how the last 10 years has kind of panned out both for you and also for the company itself.
Lisa Somers:
I mean, I’ll take the company first. That’s almost easier to do. I think, like I said in the beginning, and anybody who has an idea for a course, you’re just trying to get clients in. You’ll do that in a scrappy way. In the beginning that’s the best way, I would argue. I always say… People ask me, “If I want to do this, how do I do it?” I’m like, “Just find three to five people that’ll pay you a couple of thousand dollars and you can deliver it on Zoom.” Don’t go and build out a whole big funnel and a whole course because people might get halfway through and go, “This isn’t helping me, it’s not what I want to learn and all of that.”
So we were scrappy in the beginning and then we had a couple of lucky breaks, I would say. Obviously, they weren’t just luck, we put in a lot of work to get them, but we did get lucky in some ways where we found quite a large YouTube channel that talked all about Amazon. And so we actually partnered with them where they would make content about us. They would promote us to their audience. And so that was one of the first big breaks of, we were getting lots of people coming into the program because we had leveraged someone else’s audience.
And that was a huge takeaway for us then, and something we continue to do to this day because it is quite difficult to build an audience, as I’m sure lots of listeners here will know.
But when you can access other people’s audiences, it makes it a lot simpler. So we would run webinars to their list and they would get on with us and endorse us and all of that. And then that really started the snowball of people coming into the course, which at the time was a 997 of course great pricing and just DIY program.
And then after that we went and built out a coaching offer, a five or 6K coaching offer, and now we have low tickets and all of the above.
But that was kind of one of the biggest things that happened for us at the time, was just discovering that accessing other audiences was a much faster way to grow, getting on podcasts, doing all of the things that we still do now. And then we really, from there, the journey of the company has been discovering what we’re really good at and what we’re not good at, and outsourcing what we’re not good at to people who are.
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