 Hello, everybody. Today we have a super interesting interview with Moldechai, who is the owner and the CEO of Icon Hunt. How are you today, Moldechai? I'm good. Thank you very much for inviting me for this interview. I'm looking forward to the questions. Good. First, thanks for coming. Let's start with some information about yourself. How did you come into dropshipping and, in general, what are you doing? Yeah. So, basically, way before dropshipping, I was an entrepreneur doing a startup in the mobile applications. I had a dating app, which was kind of a mix between Tinder and Instagram. We launched it, I think, 2013. It was the year of launch. And after three or four years, we had the really successful path. So, we got to maybe, if I recall, it was a long time ago, I think three million downloads on the app. And at some point, I had to do some kind of a devotee in my journey because, as many people already know, I may read with the kids. So, I had to find a way to make extra income from the side while doing the startup. So, this is basically the first time when I got into online marketing and trying to sell anything online. And I recall a friend of mine telling me, like, there is this new thing online, people are making money with it. It's a selling t-shirts online. It's called the print on demand. Back in the days, it was a T-Spring. So, I kind of investigated this all niche. And I found out that all you have to do is to design a t-shirt to a specific audience, send traffic and you make sales. Now, it sounds easy, but trust me, it's not that simple. I lost, I think, $5,000 on testing different t-shirts. And eventually, I met someone on Facebook. He was a very generous person. He told me, like, hey, I have this Facebook group. I will help you make sales on this print on demand niche. In exchange, you will sign up using my affiliate link on T-Spring so it can make a profit when I'm making profit, which is a win-win situation because it doesn't hurt what I win. So, I jumped on the offer and he stood behind his word and from the first week, using his methods and practices, I could make sales. And a few weeks later, I made my first five figures winning product using print on demand on T-Spring. And yeah, so that's pretty much the start, how I got to dropshipping and what I did before. And I also have background in website development and graphic design. And this is what I did before being an entrepreneur and before the Army and everything, like from really young age. And yeah, that's pretty much it, man. Well, it was a Shopify store or a private store? No, it was still before the store. I think that people were just getting started to hear about Shopify and about this dropshipping concept where you can sell products from AliExpress on your private store. So it was kind of just the beginning. So before that, there were no stores. You just add like this campaign page over the T-Spring website or other platforms. So you don't really own a store, you just sell from their website. Cool. And from there, how did you come into the Shopify niche? Yeah, so just after selling t-shirts for a while, a friend of mine sent me a message and told me like, hey, I have this huge neck thing. It's called Shopify. I cannot give you the details now. I need to test it. And I will give you info in two weeks if it's working or not. And believe it or not, he sent me a message after a few days. He didn't wait even two weeks and he sent me a few days later, man, this is a gold mine. And this thing is amazing. It's going to explode and you must tap into it right now before it's too late. So I left everything behind me and started to do dropshipping on Shopify. And I remember the first product I did were jewelry. We were selling necklaces and bracelets from AliExpress. And it was just amazing. It was so simple to send traffic to a store and make sales back then. But we had many other problems that now you don't have. So it's kind of a balance. How much time did it take you to make your first sale on Shopify? Well, that's actually not a fair question for beginners because when I started doing Shopify and dropshipping, I had already a huge background experience using Facebook ads to send traffic to my t-shirts campaign. So when I started selling on Shopify, it wasn't something new. It was just a different channel to make sales. So when I did it, it took me one day. The first day I launched the ads. The second day after, I already had one or two sales. I wish it to everyone who starts. Yeah, exactly. Today it's not the situation. I can vouch for it that today on my stores, it doesn't happen like that. Sometimes it takes a week until we get to a profitable campaign. It's been really hard now, the competition and everything. So you still run stores even today when you're doing the e-command? Yeah. So the stores we're running right now, they're not like the big stores that you see online, the five or six or seven figures kind of stores. It's not like the big deal. My main focus is almost everything on the e-command. And one of the things that we do on the e-command is to run stores just to stay always with the market. Yeah, you want to always stay with the market. You always want to know what's happening right now. So we're doing stores just to always stay up to date and know what's walking and what's not walking, trying different methods on Facebook and targeting and basically just to always be on top of the industry and the changes that happens on Facebook and on shipping times and Aliexpress and et cetera. So we're not really focused on building a successful store with customers and everything. We're just only focused on always being up to date. And even if we have like a huge winner, we'll probably not even try to scale it. Just make it a few sales just to test the water and move on to the next one. Cool. So we already mentioned the e-command. So let's talk about what is e-command? Yeah. So e-command in Israel has been like I think a bit almost three years or a bit more. e-command started as a product research tool and slowly became like your one stop shop where you do everything regarding shop if I drop shipping. So you go to e-command, you find a product and then what you do. So at some when we started, this is all we had like find a product and that's it. And today we give so much more. We are teaching our audience, our customers how to sell online, how to drop ship. We have courses, we have a free one, we have a paid one. We have many new features, many new tools to help you even dig more in the products and find better opportunities when it comes to finding winning products. And obviously we have a huge community with over 70,000 members on Facebook and people are sharing their experience, their questions and we are here to help and make the and make the most possible to help you and basically to help our users to make sales online and to have a successful drop shipping store. But just before I continue talking about e-command, I just want to mention that e-command was originally started in 2017 around March and March and April. And it all started by just trying to solve a personal problem that I had. So I was like searching products every day like most of the drop shippers and the problem was that when I find winning products, I just click the save button on Facebook or just throw them in some kind of Google Sheet or something and you always forget about them. So a week later, two weeks later, you already forgot about the products that you wanted to test. Oh, you have so many products now that you would never be able to test and you already forgot which one is better to test now or less. So I created e-command just to have some kind of website, a personal website, a favorite products website where I can jump in, type in my product details and pictures and basically prepare all the research for myself before I'm actually going to test it. So when the day comes and I want to test this product, I already have a page with all the research ready to go. And after I built it, I've added about 30 products or maybe, yeah, 30, 35 products to the website. The website looked so good that I was like, man, I need to show this to a few friends of mine. And this is what we did. I sent it to, I posted it on Facebook on Huawei. I think that people can still find these posts. I wrote it like I have this cool software and I'm now opening it for better users and I need 50 people to test my product and to test e-command basically and tell me what they think about it. And after sharing this product to 50 people, one month later, I checked my user's database and I was amazed to find out that we had almost a thousand sign-ups on the website. So it went super viral. We didn't use any paid traffic or anything. It was 100% free to use. And this is basically when the, you know, this is when it all started. I saw that this is a huge potential. And so I went all in and from that moment, I like was 100% committed to e-command and making it like a huge deal and making it the next big platform for dropshippers to start. So that's your main focus today on e-command? Yeah, we could say that. We could say that the focus now is e-command and we have like huge plans and big features that are coming up. And I think that in difference than other gurus or people that teach online how to dropship or doing that kind of stuff is that with e-command, it's like a win-win situation because if I teach my users how to sell online, make profit online, they will keep using e-command, which is a win-win. So I have no interest in selling them stuff and making profit by selling them courses or stuff like that. So everything is like 100% authentic. We're giving real value. We're teaching like the real stuff that actually work right now when you're trying to dropship anything online. So this is one thing that's very important. The second one, I'm a dropshipper and my team, most of my team members are dropshippers themselves. Some of them are six-figure sellers. Some of them are five-figure sellers. And what we do here is basically translating all of the pain, all of the problems that we face when we were dropshipping and even today when we dropship and we actually build the solution to those problems. And I think that this is also a key factor if you compare e-command with other softwares. So I think that our main goal would be one to, like you said, all about e-command and everything. But I think that the bigger goal here is that we are all focused on improving the dropshipping world and making it even easier to get started and easier to sell and easier to run as successful Shopify store. Okay, cool. So I have a question. I hope that it's fine, but the products on your site, where they are coming from? Like manually, how does it work? Yes, the famous e-command became famous because of its manual research, when my team of researchers will search every single day for the top trending products, the top products that are now the best option for you to sell. So we still have this team in place. We're still doing this every single day and research from lists of hundreds of products until we find those two or three products that we upload to the website. So what we upload, it's like the best of the best from huge lists. And we also, and back in the days when we started, we're building these lists manually. Today, we also have the manual research and we also have like backend softwares that scans Shopify stores, it scans Aliexpress, we scan Google. So we are doing a lot of automated research as well and we are building huge databases of products and stores. And now it's not open to the public, but at some point it's already a plan. So it's a sneak a peek to a future feature that we'll be launching. Our users will be able to just go inside and search this huge database, like you could say like a Google of products. So it will be open soon to the users, but for now we just keep it for ourselves until it's ready. Super cool. Can you say how many products users can access right now on your site? Yeah, so now we have 2,500 products on the website and it's growing every day. This is the end picked products, but on each product we have a tool we call saturation inspector. And if you click on it, you will be able to see stores that are currently selling the product we just uploaded. And you will be also able to see all of the products that those stores have on their stores. So from each product on e-command, you can be exposed to hundreds of products. And it's just a few clicks, like two clicks and you have hundreds of products more to search on. Cool. Okay, let's talk about some things that will be interesting for beginners. And what is a good product for you? Can you give us some criteria that you would check when you search for a product to upload? Yeah, so I think that a good product is a product that one is not easy to find in stores. It's always good to have a product that is not available in the market below your apartment. I think that this is the first criteria. The second one would be the wow effect. I really like to use it because when I watch Facebook ads, I see that the ads that are actually working are those ads that have this wow effect. And when I say wow effect is basically something that I didn't expect to happen. So for example, if we take the new iPhone when we had like one camera behind and then they launched a version with three cameras. So this was the wow effect because when you first watch it, it's like, okay, it's the same iPhone like always, but then it spins around and you see that it has like three cameras. And this is when you have this wow effect. So the wow effect is basically giving in your product that you're selling an angle that surprises the customers. So for example, you can if you're selling like a mug, there was this cool mug when you watch it and it's like just a normal mug, but then it pours hot water in it and it changes color and then you see a different design on the glass. So this is also a wow effect because you didn't expect that to happen. And this is the motion that makes people want to buy the products. So if you want a product that has this tiny feature, even if it's really small that makes people go wow, like I didn't expect that, that's probably a good product to try and test. And the product should be something that really solves a problem or you think that people are just buying emotionally and it doesn't really matter. I think this is just another type of a product that you can sell online. Like there are products that are solving problems though. So there's our pain killers and stuff to help you cure your back or posture corrections. There are many products that are just simple products that solve a problem that are maybe easier to sell, but most of these products are the most attractive products. So a lot of people will search for solving problems when they try to sell online. So if you choose this product, it would be really competitive. But if you go for products that are wow effect, it's kind of, they will have less competition and will be easier to scale to the broad market because usually they are bolder in the interest. It's not like a specific niche because they're not solving a specific problem. They're more like of a broad kind of a product. And also you can find mix between them. You can find products that are solving a problem that also have this wow effect that I'm talking about. That's cool. And from your experience, experience what works better on our, like what do people mostly do once one product stores or general stores with more products? Yeah. That's like a debate. You are all the time in the dropshipping industry that people love to ask this question because it's a really confusing question, actually, because some people say that they had huge success in doing only one product store. And on the other end, you see like big famous names like the Thun Brothers that are doing general stores, and they are crushing it. Like they're already past nine figures. So you don't really know what is right and what is wrong. And I think that the right answer to this question is that there is no answer, basically. If you think that if you want to do a general store and you know what you're doing, so you'll probably have success doing general store. And if you know what you're doing and you go for one product store, you will have success as well. One thing that is important is one product stores are more expensive to make and to launch because you need to spend more time on building them. And if it fails, you need to just delete all the store and try a new one. And this kind of stuff are more expensive. And usually when you do one product store, you are more attached emotionally to your one product store and to the product. So when you will test it on Facebook, you will probably invest more money on ads before killing the entire store because you're emotionally connected to this one product store. When in general stores, the conversion may be lower, but it's easier to move from one product to a different product when you're testing. So it's really, really fast. Like you're selling a lot of time on testing those products. The downfall here on the general store is that when you test a product and it fails, you will not give it another second opportunity. You will give up really fast because you have this mindset of going fast from a product to a product. And this is also a wrong thing to do sometimes because you need to test a bit more on a product when you see good stats. You need to have a different creative and different targeting. You need to do different stuff before giving up on the product. So when doing one product store, you would give up too late and when in general store, you give up too early. So I think both of them have their pros and cons. So it's just a matter of experience. And I think that it's a matter of style. What kind of dropshipper you are? Are you like the dropshipper who prefers to do general stores or the dropshipper who goes for a more branded way, a more selling like one product and focusing on that one product store? I see that it's a really interesting approach to this problem, to this question. I also have this a lot. And yeah, so it's basically just the style of paper. Interesting. Okay. What is the average product price and average product managing that you would recommend for beginners to start with? Well, I like to say all the time that when you're just getting started dropshipping, the most important thing is to make sales. And when I say this, people say, obviously, you want to make sales because you want to make money. When beginners approach these questions and what they should sell and how much money they should charge for it, I think that this is the most important quality in dropshipping. And the answer I always like to give is just make sales. This is the most important thing when you start in dropshipping. Most people, when they hear me answer this question, they will say, obviously, I want to make sales. So what's the new big thing about your answer? What I'm saying is that you don't have to be profitable when you're making those sales. It's just a kind of a motivation booster, something that makes you feel better about yourself and about your self-confidence. So what I'm telling people when they ask me these questions, price your product really low if you just get it started. Don't think about making profit. Don't think about making money. Just be focused on making sales. And it would be easier if you price your product really low, even if the margin is almost nothing. It would give you a good feel, a good vibe. You will see your phone, you will see that you made sales. It will give you motivation to continue because you will see that it's actually working and you can actually make sales online. While all the dropshippers will price their products like every other seller, and they will advertise their products on Facebook and they would not make any sales. And after doing that for a week, two weeks, three weeks of failing a product after a product, they would just give up. They would say like, this is a scam. This entire industry is a BS. It's not real and you cannot make profits from it. Other people that didn't make any profit made sales and they have like more motivation and they would continue testing and continue doing stuff and slowly they will understand how the Facebook walks, how to read the information. And in the meanwhile, they are collecting also customers that both from their store, which they can use again to market. They can send them emails, they can send them SMS, they can do retargeting ads to sell them even more products and other products. And this is when they will become profitable. So in my opinion, if you're just getting started, don't try to price your product like everyone else. Lower your price. If it costs $5 on unexpressed, price it on your store for, I don't know, $9, $8. Like even if it's super low margin, don't think about it. Just be focused on making those sales. Okay. That's really interesting because they say that if someone's starting to get sales, the motivation will come and then also the success, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And on a e-com hunt, do you help people to find Facebook audiences to target? Yeah, exactly. So on each product page on e-comment, we give you suggestions about which targeting you should try when selling this product. Now, one big tip, and this is something we also say in the video that we're teaching targeting on e-comment, don't just copy paste what we give you because majority of people do that and it's just wrong. What you want to do is to look at these targeting suggestions that we give you and try to pivot, try to squeeze it down to find better stuff. So if you type those interests on the Facebook and you would kick the tiny arrow, you would get suggestions from Facebook for different interests but on the same niche and this will help you to dig in and find better targeting and better audiences. So what we give you is just an advice, just an image of what a good targeting will look like and what you should go for, what is the right direction when you're targeting this product because many people sometimes target stuff that are not even related to the product. So we are giving them the path and then from that point, they need to add their own angle to the targeting to tap into untapped audiences to sell this product. Great. So what do we give in the ads though? You give like copy images or how it looks like? We don't really like to go with details in this stuff because the old goal of Dropshipper, the old goal of selling online is to build yourself ground up. The goal here is to to the users to learn actually what to do and not just copy paste because copy paste is not working. It's a myth. If you're selling, if you're seeing people that sell you courses about copy paste my method and it will work, it doesn't work. What works is you need to learn what is Dropshipping, you need to learn what is Facebook, you need to learn how to do stuff in order to make them work for you. You can learn from other strategies that people are doing, test them, but you always need to know what you're doing. Like copy paste without understanding, we just make you lose money and you will not get anywhere. So you need to build your own path, your own style, your own way of doing Dropshipping and this is I think one of the most important stuff when you Dropship. Being said that, I think that also if you want to if you want to see on e-commands, you do have ads, you do have an example of a winning ad on Facebook and the goal when we do it is not to show you like, hey, this is working, copy the same thing. Again, it's a way to show you what's working and to help you think about creating something similar so it works again for you. It's not like, see this, it's working, copy it, it will not work. It's a waste of time, guys. If you want to make it work, you need to watch what's working and then recreate it with a different angle. So different angle would be maybe to shoot new videos, it would be trying different targeting, it would be changing the text on the video, trying to mash it up, maybe begin with a different part of the video and then move on to a different one. So it would be really to try stuff and not just copy-paste because copy-paste is not working and also Facebook is really smart. So if you just upload the same video of Facebook we know, this video already exists in their database and you will pay more expensive ads. So the exposure would be more expensive, the CPM would be higher and basically your ad performance would be much more expensive because this ad is already old and it will not perform like it should be if it's a brand new ad. Interesting. So a few last questions before we finish the interview. Do you consider Ecom Hunt as a tool only for Shopify dropshippers or eBay dropshippers too? Well, when we first started doing Ecom Hunt we were focusing only on Shopify and this is pretty much what we do today as well. We're almost 100% focused on the Shopify audience dropshipping with Shopify but I can say that anyone can use Ecom Hunt. It's not like a software that is only for Shopify because what we do there is sharing winning products. Now something cool that I saw someone do is I saw a course about eBay that showed them how to make sales on eBay with products from Ecom Hunt. Now what he found out is when products are trending on the Shopify stores people are going to eBay and they tap the name of the products and try to find the same product on eBay because they think they will find it cheaper from the Shopify store. So what he did is go to Ecom Hunt and each time we upload new products that are now trending he would simply upload them to the eBay store and generate organic sales without doing anything. So he would just ride the wave of the other stores that are spending money on ads to make those sales organically on eBay. So yeah, obviously you can use Ecom Hunt for anything. You can use it for Amazon. You can use it for eBay. You can use it for whatever you want because the start point is we offered you products that are proven to sell. So if you want to know what's selling, what's working, this is where you go. You go to Ecom Hunt and you find proven to sell products. That's interesting. It's very interesting story. Interesting how it worked for him. Yeah. So what I think about the future of the dropshipping, how will it look five years from now, for example? Well, my gods told me that dropshipping is changing into a more legit kind of industry because now it's kind of gray. It's somewhere in between the white and black hat. You know, it's something in the middle. And many companies are scared from dropshippers. A good example is PayPal and Stripe. All the payment getaways are scared from dropshippers. Some of them already closed. There is a company in Israel that doesn't accept any dropshippers anymore because of the charge pay and disputes and stuff. So it's kind of a gray zone. And what I see in the industry that it slowly becomes more and more authentic, more and more legit. And a good example is PayPal. I actually had a call with them yesterday and they're now launching a new story about dropshippers. Like they're launching content about dropshippers and they have like this built land page where they actually talk to dropshippers. Like they're sending an offer to dropshippers. So they already understood that dropshipping is going to be the next thing and it's turning legit. So I think that what other people, other big companies will do, they will just do the same. They will start to build more custom stuff to dropshippers to make this even simpler to sell online and easier to get started. This is the market wise. Like this is what would happen in big companies in my opinion. The second thing is that I see that more and more people are trying to be more legit with their business of dropshipping. There is kind of a self-education that's happening that people understand that dropshipping is not just an easy way to make money online. It's a real business. This is a real deal. This is a real thing. You can build your future, your financial future on it. So they're taking it more in series. They're looking to check the product's quality. They shoot videos. They pay for professional pictures. They build homemade studios just to shoot the products. And I think that this is a good thing to dropshipping. And I see the future, I see a brighter future for the dropshipping industry. Cool. And yeah, we also see this trend and the other dropshippers are becoming more professionals, less scammy. People really try to build businesses for the long term. People are not coming already to make one boom. And that's all. It's something that we had also in the past with some different tricks that people did. So it's really cool to see that. I agree with you. And can you share one last thing that you would recommend to a new dropshipper who just started his journey? Yeah. So one tip that crossed my mind right now when you told me this is the investment part. So if you're getting started and you didn't fix a budget, this is a good thing to do. You need to fix a budget. So if you're going to open an offline business, you already know exactly how much money you would be investing, because you need to pay rent, you need to pay inventory, you need to pay employees. So even before spending this money, you already know what you're going to spend. And this helps you to create some kind of a business plan. This helps you to create some kind of a picture of what will happen in each scenario. So for example, in the dropshipping world, what I like to do is to say, like, okay, I'm testing this product, I'm going to invest on it $500. What will I do with this $500? Okay, I will launch ads for $300. $200 would go for creative, for maybe someone to build a store. And basically, I build my business plan on this $500. And then what I have left, I have like $300 for ads. And I will be investing this $300, like it's the last thing I have to do in my life. So I will go to Facebook and I will build smart campaigns and I will check everything in detail and try to make the most from this $300 to make it work. And even if it's not working, I know when to stop, you know, because I only said I have like $500, that's it. And if it doesn't work, I would just stand up and go away. I will not keep testing this product and lose more money on it. Unless it's giving me positive results, maybe if I'm breaking even, I would maybe try to give a bigger budget to test more. But usually when I see that number is not what I'm looking for, we just move on to the next product. So the tip is fix the budget before doing anything and build yourself a business plan with what will you do with this $500 and which each dollar, you would know exactly what you do. It will help you to create success faster. Amazing. It's a great tip so people can really focus and know that this is what they have and this is what they're working with. And thank you very much for this amazing interview, Moldechai. I'm sure that it will help to a lot of people. And we will attach a link to your comment below this video or below this podcast. And thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me for this interview. It was a pleasure. The questions were right on point. I gotta say you made me sweat at some questions. I had to think about what is the right answer to make the most impact when people watch this and try to alter the most by just entering a theoretical answer. And guys, if you watch this, don't give up. Some of my answers may make you think it's really hard, but it's a good business to start with. And if you do it smartly and not just gambling money on Facebook, I'm sure that you will see success. So again, thank you very much for inviting me. And I hope that you will find my answer helpful for your dropshipping stores. Thank you. Bye. Bye.