Welcome to Uploading the podcast where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth platforms, tools and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join castmagic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. We be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter and we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators. So make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show. Welcome to today's episode of Uploading. Today we're joined by Eugene Kman, who is the COO of million dooll sellers MDs, which is an elite community for top Amazon entrepreneurs.

Eugene helped grow MDS from a humble Facebook group into a six figure membership community of over 650 founders, generating over $8 billion in annual sales. And he did it while running his own Amazon brand as well. So in today's workshop we're going to cover how Eugene grew MDS into a thriving community without quitting his day job. He strategies and values that he's used to grow MDs. For example, give more, get more, which has made MDS super successful. The business model behind MDS and why people pay over $7,000 a year to be part of this network and so much more.

So.

So Eugene, without any further ado, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got involved in MDS and you know, just, just what it's all about.

Yeah, well, thank you for the little intro. So it came about in a very organic way. I mean, I entered the Amazon business. You're behind the computer and you're alone and I was looking for other people that were doing the same thing. There weren't any at the time. There wasn't, you know, any groups around of people that were doing what I was doing, which was just importing things from China and selling them on Amazon. Pretty funny. That didn't exist before, before but most of the Amazon sellers were just doing retail arbitrage.

So there were a couple groups here and there that were, you know, just. And said, you come to this Foot Locker, get a good discount, buy some Nikes and Jordans and list them on Amazon. That's how most people did it. Then I stumbled upon this group called mds. Well, it wasn't called MDS at the time, but what made it different is it was a verified Private label sellers. So in the beginning, the verification line was just $10,000 a month and there were about 50 members when I joined. So I came in, saw this group, they quickly raised that bar to 1 million a year or $50,000 a month was like kind of the next one. Then it was 1 million a year.

And being a member, I finally became kind of part of something I was really enjoying, was just a Facebook group. There was nothing else going on and everybody was trying to kind of figure out what they were, how to succeed in this business. So we had that common denominator. Everybody was struggling to figure it out. There wasn't much information about, you know, doing this kind of business. So there was a, you know, a real kind of wantingness to share information with one another. And also being that everybody was verified and there was no, you know, kind of pitching or no like outside service providers, it made it kind of a very safe place. So I came in and I decided to say, hey, let's all meet up in person.

I put together a little event in Cancun about I guess six years ago and 80 people, I mean at that time that group was about 120 people on Facebook. And 80 of those people actually flew down to Cancun for this meetup. I think I charged at the time like $99 for a ticket. I lost a ton of money. But it was just something I did for fun and I got to know everybody in person and that's kind of what started this community journey. And over time I continue to do more events. MDs became what it is and we partnered and started treating it like, like a real community, you know, growing organically from members, things like that. And here we are today.

We're kind of the E Commerce founders community for, you know, that seven to nine figure sellers. Great.

So you covered a whole bunch of stuff there that I think is really important that you could easily just glaze over. But we're going to get into all of that. One thing just before I start asking you those questions is tell me about where you stand now. What characterize the community? How much does it cost to be in the community? How much revenue are you guys doing on an annual basis? How many members are in the community? Just give us some of those stats.