How This Young African-American Entrepreneur went from Throwing Baseballs to Betting Big on The Future of Retail
This entrepreneur is going all-in on The Future of Retail
“Can you play?”
That was gut check 1.
“Are you sure you can play?”
That was gut check 2.
Darrin Levine looked hard at himself in the mirror, and after the second gut check decided to hang up his cleats for good. Without a second’s thought, Darrin hopped into his car, left baseball camp and started the drive back home to Minnetonka, Minnesota. There was only one thing on his mind as he made the long 21-hour trip back home.
Building his company.
[Hey you — Welcome to Graveti’s “Making the Leap” Series where we feature Founders of Color building amazing ventures in Minnesota. In this series, we distill some of the tactics and principles these founders used to make the leap into Entrepreneurship in an entertaining and informative way. Alright…back to our regularly scheduled programming]
Darrin Levine is the founder of ASDAL.
ASDAL is a 7-figure business that provides retail operations teams with software that allows them to maximize & simplify their workflow on Amazon through reporting, machine learning and analytics.
In other words, when you go onto Amazon to buy your favorite branded wrist-watch, chances are that ASDAL’s software, GRIT, will be in the backend helping that brand crush it on Amazon. With huge contract sizes and numerous brands signed on, ASDAL is making its mark on eTail (electronic retailing).
The Come-Up
It’s funny to think that without taking an e-commerce class in college, Darrin would never have started this company.
“We had this project where we had to find out how we could use the internet as a way to increase traditional retail”
This project sent the wheels turning..actually…roaring in Darrin’s head. He was mesmerized by consumers’ buying patterns; especially how these patterns translated from the physical world to the online world. But the actual specific project still had not become clear to him.
On one particularly uneventful day, when browsing for different baseball cleats on Amazon, Darrin had a striking moment of clarity. This led to a question that would change the course of Darrin’s life.
“How exactly does online retail work?”
Instead of being satisfied with a basic google search, Darrin decided to dive in head-first. He wanted to be very strategic about learning how online retail worked.
Tactical Tips: These tips come from the actions that Darrin took to learn more about online retail. The same principles can apply for learning about other subject areas.
Darrin…
- Went to the library and borrowed a book about Keyword Research and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- Joined the freelance services website Upwork and applied to 30+ gigs for keyword research on different E-commerce products
- Offered to work for free in exchange for a deeper understanding and applied knowledge in those areas
Darrin made a baseline template and then would tweak his message as needed, but ultimately he would copy and paste the same message to all of the different gigs on the platform.
Just to be clear — he offered his services for FREE.
Guess how many gigs he got…
…ZERO.
After what seemed like the 39th rejection, something interesting happened.
Somebody gave Darrin a shot.
This person wanted Darrin to do keyword research for a product that she was working on.
“I just followed the SEO book and built a database of 2000 keywords using google sheets” Darrin says. “Then I followed my gut to find the keywords that would rank”.
This person appreciated Darrin’s work and offered him another project for a product on Amazon.This time for $200.
Darrin had hit the jackpot.
Somebody was paying him for a service that he was providing; it was a pretty good feeling.
So How exactly did Darrin go from a one-off $200-project to a $6.4 million Amazon product launch?
The $200 project gave Darrin the ability to take on other projects for the same amount. Before long, he was making $2000/month from 6 clients using his data analytics knowledge and skill-sets that he had developed by working explicitly on the Amazon platform.
However, Darrin was still in school. And, he had also taken up an internship working a job for a Fortune 500 company.
“I sat at a desk in Corporate America with a paid internship, making $17/hour, and I completely hated it…There would be some days where I had work, and other days where I did absolutely nothing.”
That’s where the early stirrings, of what would become ASDAL, began. Darrin wanted to find out how he could grow that $2000/month he was making into an actual business.
But he needed bigger clients to make that happen.
So he went on LinkedIn, monster.com and other sites to put up numerous ads for his Amazon specialist services. He offered heavily discounted prices on these ads. You’d expect people to be tripping over their feet trying to work with Darrin with all of his previous success. But that did not happen. It was hard to get a bigger brand to trust him.
Once again, somebody took a chance on him.
Have you ever looked at an eclipse with the naked eye, and smiled as you risked potential blindness.
Chances are you haven’t. You probably put on Solar Eclipse Glasses, looked up, and smiled at the beauty that is the universe-in-action.
Darrin met with a garage-type brand that was starting the process of selling Solar Eclipse Glasses on Amazon. Over the course of that summer, with the help of Darrin’s management, the brand became the #2 best-selling Solar Eclipse Glasses on Amazon, grossing around $6.4 million. During the five months that he was on the project, Darrin did just about everything that it takes to run a successful 7 figure account; he even worked out of the garage and personally helped ship everything.
“I Learnt 2 years worth of knowledge in 5 months”
Darrin made a lot of money from this contract. A lot…But instead of splurging it all on bitcoin, buying bottles at the club or grabbing a fancy-hip new apartment, Darrin put the money into launching his fledgling business — ASDAL. Short for “A Seller’s Daily Amazon life.”
1 client soon became 2, then 3, and …. (you get the picture). This led to Darrin hiring more full-time staff and really building out his team. He hired a salesperson to make calls for $500 every two weeks, and also hired a customer service person to keep the existing clients happy. This lean setup gave him the flexibility to really focus on testing and building out a predictable sales model.
ASDAL was getting 6–12 month contracts worth upwards of $30,000. They also had a 100% success rate; because they built up the know-how, strategy and tools to assess the odds of success on Amazon for any brand.
It wasn’t long before Darrin decided to put all of his company’s know-how into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool called GRIT. This was the first-step in realizing a dream that started when he was in college — building software for the different online marketplaces. Amazon was the first of these marketplaces that he tackled. By building and documenting his knowledge in providing services on that platform, Darrin knew what worked and what DIDN’T work. It was now a matter of building a software around the best-practices.
Long story short — creating GRIT was difficult.
Tactical Tips: Here are some of the mistakes that Darrin made when trying to build GRIT. Learn these mistakes so that you can AVOID them when trying to build out your own SaaS tool:
According to Darrin — if you go to a developer and ask them to build something for you without having a comprehensive plan or vision on what you want that thing to look like, then you’re practically leaking money.
“A majority of a developer’s cost comes from the upfront research required to figure out how to even build the product”
So here’s how you can reduce the amount of research that your developer will have to do, and smooth out the path for an amazing product:
- Do your research into products that are comparable to the one that you want to create, and see how your product will differ.
- Have different mockups of the product — this could be as simple as going on google slides and creating a slideshow of what you want the product to do.
- If you already have some data, like Darrin did, put all of it together and show your developer this data to give them more context about your product.
After learning from his mistakes. Darrin is on course to successfully launching GRIT. Here’s a sneak peek of the software below :
Main Take-Aways
If you were to forget 99% of this ENTIRE article, below are the 1% worth of tips that you should REMEMBER and implement.
Document and Review your learnings: It could be as simple as putting your ideas on your wall, curating clips from youtube, or even setting up a google doc to write down interesting thoughts or pieces of information that you come across. After documenting, review, and then repeat the entire process again. Darrin used his bedroom-wall to piece together his thoughts.
Learn how to talk about your startup: Record yourself talking about your startup, and really getting into the flow of practicing it in front of any audience. This could be as simple as talking about the startup to your friends, family, or in some cases people at Starbucks. If there is any confusion with your pitch, then you know that there’s some space for improvement. The video below is the first practice pitch that Darrin recorded.
Note: This video is from 3 years ago when Darrin would practice pitching ASDAL’s service. The video is dated and does not represent all of ASDAL’s services.
Develop your skills by reading, taking online courses or listening to audiobooks: In July of 2017, Darrin had 22 prospective clients and closed 0% of them. So he decided to take an emotional intelligence course, and immediately saw the effect on his sales. In his words, “ it was a massive compound effect that helped me close 2 massive clients”.
Darrin is also an avid fan of audiobooks. Here are some of the books he listens to: “Full Engagement”, “Sell or be Sold”, “Conversion Code”, “Louder than words” and “The Tech Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide”.
These books helped him understand that simplifying a business (to the point where you can explain it to a 6th grader) was a huge superpower. It also offered amazing nuggets-of-wisdom for how to think about the customer’s journey.
Darrin Levine is somebody to watch out for in the Twin Cities.
To learn more about ASDAL Inc. visit their website @ www.asdal.io
They can’t wait to say hello to you
