How I turned Amazon into my #1 source of passive income

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ll know that over the years I’ve made most of my passive income from making & selling information products like ebooks, video courses and membership sites.

And you’ve no doubt seen how excited I get talking about split testing course ideas, designing email funnels to warm up readers and generally making bank from selling people what’s in my crazy-ass head.

But here’s the thing…

…good quality information products (the type people will actually pay for and NOT refund), especially the premium priced online courses I specialize in, take an eternity to create – and even longer to promote.

You experience so much blood, sweat and tears, that you’d swear you’re an extra in Quentin Tarantino’s latest slasher flick!

Worse yet, even when you knock a new info product launch out of the park there is inevitably a ceiling to growth and a plateau in sales.

And I know very well that information products are NOT for everyone, because readers often email me all kinds of things like:

“I’m not an expert in anything, what could I possibly teach people”
“I can’t write 50,000 words on a topic!”
“I don’t want to go on camera…I’d rather watch Adam Sandlers’ entire back catalogue”
“I can’t take 3 months out of my life to make an online course”
“I made my ebook, but no one is buying it”

So the question that invariably follows is…

“Richard, you online-course-creating-douchebag, help me!  How can I make passive income WITHOUT creating info products?”

Well, there is one way in particular that stands out.  And the crazy thing is…

This idea can easily make 10x more money than information products

Hello ecommerce!

Or more specifically, selling your own products on Amazon.

In fact, in less than a year of starting this idea my business partner and I were making more money from this than from our entire info products business (a business we’d been working 5 years on!!).

Re-read that sentence!  And re-read it again.

It’s depressing for us in a way.  But oh so good too.

And the reason it was even possible is because this (relatively) new passive income idea is so much more scalable than info products ever could be.

Scalable in terms of product creation AND scalable in terms of marketing.  In other words, it is much quicker and easier to launch and grow this business than other passive income businesses (like info products).

And let us not forget, scalability is the #1 secret behind generating serious, life-changing passive income.

* TYPICALITY DISCLAIMER: Before marching on, it is worth being crystal clear here – my results and those of other ecommerce sellers may not be typical.  For example, typical ASM members joining between 2013-2016 who completed this ecommerce training program and launched a new brand had median annual revenue of $60,750.00.  Which is not bad at all, but just nowhere near our own great results. It really does come down to hard work and perseverance – which is a super important point, so I’ll harp on more about this below.

But until recently selling products online was an idea few of us could pursue

In fact, only a few years ago the idea that you could generate passive income from selling your own products online was fanciful.

After all, setting up an ecommerce business with your own online store involves so much work and is as far from passive as it gets.

In fact, if you suggested this idea to me back in 2005 I would have laughed in your face, called up the sanitarium and told them to move Kanye West one padded cell over, because I have a brand new customer ready for pick up!

Hey, this was back when people who were crazy enough to sell online, actually fulfilled orders from their bedrooms!!

But these days, thanks to Amazon FBA (fulfilled by Amazon), it is entirely possible to generate serious passive income selling products online.

And since this idea is arguably much more lucrative than info products (or other passive income ideas), whilst also being fairly hands-off thanks to Amazon, I have declared it the sexiest passive income opportunity in 2022!

So if you’re living in the countries where Amazon FBA currently operates (hello USA, Canada, UK, Europe, Japan – and soon in crocodile-Dundee, throw-a-shrimp-on-the-barbie Australia, where Amazon recently soft launched), it is time to seriously consider this idea.

Side note – if you don’t live in one of these countries, you can still setup an Amazon business abroad, eg in the USA.  So the opportunity is really open to everyone!

So what does this passive income idea involve?

Before I tell you what it is, let me tell you what it is NOT.

I am NOT talking about buying other companies products at low prices (e.g. during a Walmart sale) and then selling them on Amazon at a higher price.

This is known as ‘retail arbitrage’ ecommerce and is an insanely time consuming and low profit exercise.

Instead, what we’re talking about is selling your own branded products on Amazon.  e.g. your own line of cooking gadgets or BBQ products etc – or if you’re like us, your own health & fitness products.

This is easily the smartest approach to take if you want to ride the Amazon boom in ecommerce.

Like all ideas, there is definitely some upfront work involved

I’m not going to sell you some B.S. dream where this idea is so easy to execute that you could do it in your freakin sleep like some narcoleptic nut job!

As the reality is there is quite a bit of upfront work.

After all, to get it all setup you have to choose a product, do some branding work (name, logo etc), find a supplier, order away and then launch on Amazon.

I remember when we first got setup on Amazon the process took about 2 months from start to finish (with about 10-15 hours of work a week).  i.e. from initial product idea to our first sale.

And if anyone tells you different, please ask them what they’re smoking!

But once your product is up on Amazon, (i.e. you’ve done the initial hard work), things get a lot more passive.

Here’s why selling on Amazon can be the perfect passive income idea

Instead of an old school ecommerce business where you would spend months and months trying to launch your own online store, and then many months more desperately hustling around online trying to sell your product, Amazon takes care of it all for you.

In fact, the minute you’ve got your product ready to go, the Amazon machine steps in and starts working for you by putting your product in front of it’s huge audience of interested buyers.

Best of all, you can get your product showing up in front of 1000s of Amazon customers by doing a couple of simple things that don’t take a lot of time.

For example, you can turn on Amazon pay-per-click ads.  Which is as easy as simply clicking a single button in your Amazon Seller account to activate them!  And as a bonus, Amazon ads are so much cheaper than Google ads.

Another easy way to get lots of eyeballs on your product from day one, is to use an automated launch service.  Preferably one that is still within Amazon’s terms of service (TOS) or within a white/grey area of it, eg Zonblast (now under the Six Leaf umbrella).  Once again, this just involves a few clicks and you’re setup.

And another way to get prospective customers attention fast, is to use Amazon’s cool new Lightning Deals feature to giveaway a few dozen units of your product at a discount.  Also a one-click feature!

See how easy Amazon makes ecommerce!  You literally don’t need to do any of the complicated work involved in running a traditional ecommerce business.

Best of all, Amazon literally takes care of all the heavy lifting for you

They store your inventory.

They accept payments on your behalf.

They pick, pack and send your products.

Heck, they even handle all of your fulfillment-related customer service – even returns!

This is all thanks to the Fulfilled By Amazon program (FBA) they offer to all sellers and exactly what makes the Amazon opportunity so passive you might just want to give away your first born to Mr Bezos as a thank you gift!

In fact, once you’re up and running, I dare say making money from Amazon gets so passive that you almost get bored…like Season 2 of Better Call Saul bored.

But of course that’s when you start adding more and more products to your brand.  And that’s when you really start to build your ecommerce empire.

And that’s also when you can potentially move from making say a couple $1,000 a month on Amazon to making some serious ‘quit your boring ass job’ passive income every month.

I’d say building a portfolio of over 5 products is actually the #1 secret to making selling on Amazon really work for you.

The size of this Amazon ecommerce opportunity is huge

If you want to get a good idea of just how much money this Amazon opportunity offers and some tips on how to get started, then watch this video and download the PDF guide below the video as it reveals the top 100 product ideas you could sell on Amazon.

Meaning you can literally see straight away (like today!) exactly what products you could possibly make money selling on Amazon.

This product ideas list will save you 100s of hours of research and $1000s in dumb product selection decisions – I know it sure did for us.

Fair warning: the above video is NOT by me.  And there is a bit of hot air in it.  I think I even saw people tossing beach balls around at the start of it, ay carumbaaa.

But, and this is a big but I can’t deny, the information they share in the video – as well as the ‘top 100 product ideas’ PDF – is extremely solid and well worth your time.

Also, you know I don’t pull any punches or hold the truth from you.  So I want to let you know that the guys in the video have a course on how to make money selling on Amazon (and that is an affiliate link above), so that’s why they’re putting out all this quality info for free.

Now, admittedly, there are a few complicated things involved in this business idea, especially when it comes to getting it setup.  So the question becomes…

How the heck do you get started selling on Amazon?

Well, there are 2 options really.  And both are good, but which one you choose just depends on what your situation looks like.

Option 1

You can learn directly from the guys my business partner and I learned from.

They’ll show you how to make passive income from Amazon from start to finish.  These are the same guys that helped take our own Amazon business from good to great in a matter of months.

This is a smart option, if you’re like us.

i.e. you are serious about making passive income, don’t want to mess around for a couple of years trying to figure it all out on your own and instead are dying to make it happen in the next couple of months.

Option 2

You can read my own 80-20 summary of how we personally make money on Amazon (below) and then you can use this as your base plan.

Then you can go to Reddit, join some Amazon FBA Facebook groups and dig into all kinds of other forums, plus scour some blogs and books to further research all the ideas, and work out how to pull them off.

This is a good option if you simply don’t have the cash to invest in the training we did.  Something I fully appreciate.

But you should definitely be cautious and tread slowly, because if you tackle the Amazon opportunity, then unlike many other passive income ideas (e.g. ebooks, online courses etc) you are going to need to invest some money in inventory and initial marketing.

And so when you make mistakes in this game they can be rather costly, which is exactly why we invested in the course.

i.e. we took Option 1 just to make sure we had every box checked (we are cautious like that) and didn’t waste $1000s or months of time on dumb ideas.

Our step-By-Step approach to making serious passive income on Amazon in 2022

As with everything on this site, our strategy is completely free.  And completely yours to copy!

Seriously, you can 100% rip this off.

Note: Obviously this is only the 80-20 version of how my business partner and I sell on Amazon.  There are many more advanced strategies that we use to go next level on Amazon and they’re all detailed in the course by our Amazon mentors.

1) Choose a product in a low-Medium competition sub-Niche

Before we look at how to work out what is a low-medium competition niche, let’s first work out what a sub-niche looks like.

So an example of a niche is men’s fitness.

An example of a sub-niche within this niche is weight lifting products – you know the sort of products those protein-munching gorillas in your gym use.

Products that fit within this sub-niche might include weight lifting gloves, wrist straps, back/weight belts, liquid chalk, tanning oil etc.  (Joking on the oil, maybe)

So now, in order to identify whether this is a low-medium competition sub-niche you want to look at the BSR (best seller rank on Amazon, which shows you how much a product is selling) of the top 5 sellers across these products.

That means you literally jump over to Amazon, type in something like “weight lifting gloves” and then check the BSR of the top 5 results.  Note – you can find the BSR of a product by scrolling down to the “Product Details” section.

You want their BSR to be low, ie below 2000, but not too low, ie below say 250.

That’s because this sweet spot means you have a product that sells well, but is not going to be overly dominated by any 1 seller or otherwise insanely competitive.

Admittedly, this step is very difficult as not many products satisfy this test.

So you can either try research it yourself or you can check out the top 100 product ideas PDF here (just enter your email below the video to download the guide).

This PDF contains product ideas that largely satisfy the test.  Something I believe they managed to do by using a smart software program to filter through 1000s and 1000s of products, as well as a couple 100 hours of manual labor.  Mucho appreciado!

Now, if you want to know 2 of my favorite niches on Amazon, then I will tell you straight up.

I quite like the Travel and Sports & Outdoor niches.  You’ll find lots of demand in both, but not an insane amount of competition (yet / relative to other Amazon niches).

Side note – you’ll probably see a lot of big brand names showing up in these niches, but don’t fear.  The majority of them still have no idea what they’re doing on Amazon (and thus don’t have optimized product listings etc), because they’re too obsessed with their own sales channels.

Something else worth noting is that lots of people will tell you to do the exact opposite of my advice above.

They’ll tell you to look at higher competition niches and lower BSR products, eg supplements –> probiotics, and say “that’s where the gold is me matey” in some weird Johnny Depp pirate accent.

And hey, maybe this was a reasonable suggestion a couple years ago.

But these days I personally think these extremely low BSR-dominated niche/product categories are far too competitive for beginners who don’t have a lot of spare time or money to invest.

In fact, I know personally just how difficult they are as I sell in the single most competitive category on Amazon.  And you don’t want to know how much money we’ve plowed into promotions and whatnot to spur on sales!

Hint: avoid these categories like the plague if you don’t have deep pockets or are not looking to experience a full blown brain aneurysm this year.

Importantly, when choosing your product sub-niche, try to look for one where the products typically sell on Amazon for around the $20-$50 mark, have a COGS (cost of goods sold) around $3-$10*, and are lightweight, small, easy to ship etc.

*Aiming for a 10-25% COGS ratio really is the way to go.

If you download the product ideas PDF you’ll see most of the products meet these additional strict criteria.  100s of hours of research went into that, so definitely worth making use of this!

2) Find a sub-Niche that is ripe for taking over

What I’m saying hear is that you should try to find a sub-niche where the leading 3-5 sellers of several products (you might want to sell) don’t have more than say 300-500 x 5-star reviews.

Better yet, try to find one where the leader has less than 150-250 reviews and the average rating of their product is only 3.5-4 stars.  i.e. they’re selling well despite the fact that people aren’t happy or over the moon with their product.

That sort of combination represents a big opportunity for you to come in and disrupt their mediocre products / crush them like some sort of ecommerce-crazed Sun Tzu!

3) Make a product that will stand out from the competition

To do this you simply need to make a product that addresses customers biggest complaints about the existing products.

And to identify these problems you simply need to look at the negative reviews of your competitors products on Amazon.  Especially the 1, 2 and 3 star reviews.

Of course, be sure to also checkout the 5 star reviews to see what people are loving, as you’ll likely want to keep those features.

I dare say that smart customer-driven customization like this is THE key to being successful on Amazon in 2022.

Not only will it make it easy for you to market your product, but it will also make it easy for you to get 5 star reviews, since you’ve finally delivered on what customers have been screaming out for.

Best of all, you should realize that customization is usually super simple.

For example, let’s think back to the weight lifting gloves example I talked about above.

The 3.5 star reviews for the top 3 selling gloves may all be just about how the gloves wear out at the pressure point areas too fast (because the padding is too thin there).  Great!

All you need to do is go and make extra padded gloves and then push that new feature hard on your Amazon listing (especially in the title).

Plus, maybe after looking at the 5 star reviews, you see how much leather quality matters to customers and so you decide to amp it up and use an even better quality leather than the competition (softer, nicer scent, whatever customers are talking about).  And you push that feature too.

And maybe as a 3rd point of customization/differentiation, you also offer the gloves in a 2nd color that the other companies aren’t offering, but which customers want (something you know because you read the negative reviews).

Customization done!

See how this is not rocket science and rather extremely doable?

4) Find a supplier from China, but do it the smart way

Today, it is so much easier to source products from China than when my business partner Jack and I were gallivanting around the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China, years back.

That’s mainly because, the Internet – by way of Alibaba – has made finding a good supplier just about as easy as finding a decent Italian restaurant on Yelp!  Seriously.

Here is a great video walking you through just how easy it is these days.

As you’ll see in the video, thanks to the Internet and sites like Alibaba, all the grunt work of finding suppliers and ordering products is gone.

Which means…

…you no longer have to get on a plane and travel half way around the world to China.

…you no longer have to go on dozens of factory tours or develop relationships (‘guanxi’) over many months just in order to purchase your first product.

…and you no longer have to get ripped off left, right and center by dodgy Chinese manufacturers and middle men over a maotai-fueled dinner.

Those days are long gone.

Instead, now thanks to the power of the Internet you can literally sit down at your desk, log onto Alibaba and get a shortlist of high quality suppliers in no time.

You simply search your keyword (eg wrist straps), then filter the list by criteria that matters to you (eg price, minimum order quantity, years in business, location, delivery time etc) and voila, you have a highly curated shortlist of suppliers.

You can even see ratings given to each supplier by previous customers like you.

See how this really is like Yelp for suppliers!

5) Get some samples and then put in your first order

Obviously you’ll first want to get a sample of your product from roughly 5 suppliers.  That way you can test out their customer service levels and attention to detail in the finished product.  i.e. you don’t just want to rely on Alibaba reviews.

Once you’ve done that, go with the supplier who offers the best quality at a reasonable price (not the lowest price), and ticks all your other criteria above.

When you put in your first order, try to go for a low MOQ (minimum order quantity).

That way you can just test the product idea on Amazon and see how customers respond, before ordering a big supply.

Something like 500 units is a nice MOQ to get for your first order, so definitely try to negotiate it down to this level if it is higher.

Also, make sure you organize a reputable freight forwarder so that when your units land in the US you can easily ship them onto Amazon’s FBA warehouses.

P.S. I know I am turbocharging through all of these steps and they might seem daunting, but just keep in mind all the info you need to execute them is in the course – even freight forwarder recommendations!

(See how much time and money the course can save you if you decide to pursue this opportunity)

6) Launch on Amazon and get reviews straight away

Since you have customized your product with better features than the competition AND the quality is higher, you could think about pricing it higher than the competition.

But if I was you, I would first price a little lower than the competition in order to spur on initial sales (and reviews).

And that’s because the more sales you get, the more reviews you get, and Amazon’s sales-hungry algorithm rewards products with higher rankings the more sales they get.

i.e. a snowball effect.

Now, I must say it often makes sense to first get 10 reviews for your product BEFORE you do any paid marketing.  That way you get max bang for your advertising buck.

To get these initial reviews you have a few different options and you could use one or a combination of them.

Of course, I recommend you keep things legit.

So definitely avoid those dodgy review groups (eg on Facebook), and preferably avoid asking friends and family (F&F) to review your product, as both are against Amazon terms of service (TOS).

And would you believe it, Amazon’s fraud algorithms are getting so good that they can often link these review groups and even your social network from Facebook, to determine if you are making use of dodgy reviews.

But if you do go with F&F (especially ones you’re not connected to on social networks), then make sure they actually buy your product and pay full price.  That way you have a better chance of getting a ‘verified review’ from them and making it stick.

Probably the best advice though for getting your initial reviews is to find 10 passionate bloggers in your niche who will appreciate the better quality product you’ve designed and/or top Amazon reviewers who are interested in your product/niche, and send it to them for free.

Make sure you don’t say “this is free in EXCHANGE for a review”.  As that is against TOS.  Instead, rely on the fact that most of these professional reviewers love sharing their thoughts on products with the community.

Finally, one other idea is to use Amazon’s relatively new ‘early reviews program’.

As part of this program Amazon will once again do all the hard work for you by sending your new product to some of its best reviewers (and the pretense/quasi-requirement is for them to leave a review).  This is obviously fully compliant with Amazon’s TOS since they run it.  And the reviews should thus flow in.  How easy!

You can find a bunch of other ideas on how to smartly launch your product on Amazon in this video.

7) Turn on Amazon ads and get the sales flowing in

Since you’re in a low-medium competition niche, you shouldn’t need to spend 5-10k on the product launch / initial marketing.

Instead, now with 10 reviews in hand, you can simply turn on Amazon pay-per-click ads.

I’d do this aggressively when starting out.  Which means I’d setup my Amazon PPC campaign with rather high bids.

As you’ll see when you set this up, you don’t have to write the ad copy like with Google adwords.  Which means all up Amazon PPC only takes about 10 minutes to setup.

And then going forward you can use a 3rd party app like Sellozo, to completely automate the optimization of your ad bids.  Meaning no ongoing work.

See how truly passive this idea is once you’re up and running!

8) Optional – use a paid launch service to speed things up

If you want to get to page 1 for your main search terms really fast, eg weight lifting gloves, or if there is a bit more competition in your sub-niche than you expected, then you can ‘buy’ or ‘bully’ your way to the top.

The easiest way would be to use a fairly legitimate paid launch/promotions service like Zonblast, now under the Six Leaf umbrella.

I say ‘fairly legitimate’, because I worry Amazon may one day tweak its algorithm to remove giveaway/deep-discount sales from the sales velocity measure, and thus render this technique useless.  But for now, it works amazing, albeit within a grey area of TOS.

Now, with Six Leaf’s Zonblast service, when launching a new product I would most likely do a ‘4 day wave’, where you give out say 50 units a day for 4 days in a row, at a significant discount (90-95% off).  This should have a huge boost on your product’s rankings as the Amazon algorithm loves seeing such high sales velocity.

And once your product moves up the rankings, it then starts to enjoy ‘organic’ sales.  i.e. customers who see it when they search Amazon and buy without clicking an ad.

The Zonblast service itself would cost about $297 or so (i.e. their 1 product a month plan), and of course you would also have to wear the product and Amazon fulfillment costs.

See why it pays to have a product that has a COGS around $3-$7.

So to conclude, this aggressive (and entirely optional) ‘bully’ strategy has the potential to effectively catapult the product to page 1 of a low-medium competition product sub-niche AND get the organic sales kicking in fast.

And I should know, has I have used this approach to get to page 1 for some of the most competitive search terms on Amazon.  It works.

Of course, the only drawbacks are this is not cheap, and your product (and images, sales text and initial reviews) better be good enough quality to help you ‘stick’ once you’re on page 1.  i.e. your product needs to be good at converting eyeballs into sales to maintain its high ranking for the search term(s).

9) Rinse and repeat steps 1 to 8 for your second product

Once your first product is fully launched, has some reviews and is making both PPC and organic sales, then it is time to think about launching your 2nd product.

I personally wait for my first product to average about 10 sales a day, before moving onto the next one.

And then once product 2 is also selling well, do it all over again for product 3, product 4, etc.

Adding more products as each new product is successfully launched is oh so important.  But the key is to make sure you are adding complementary products that customers of your first product would likely buy.

This sort of cross-selling and up-selling is exactly how you grow sales and your brand from the small time to the big time.

Now hopefully you can see why I really made sure you focused on picking a sub-niche above, before picking your first product.  e.g. you can build a brand/product range around weight lifting accessories (sub-niche), not so much just weight lifting gloves (individual product).

10) Build an email list of customers (this will change everything)

As you start nailing the product launches, you will then want to start building an email list of customers.

That’s because an email list is the #1 way you can turn Amazon from a side business into a life-changing quit-your-job kind of business.  (It’s also the #1 secret sauce for reaching 7+ figures in annual ecommerce sales)

Here’s why it works so well…

…it will make getting reviews and sales for your new products 10x easier and faster than your first product.

…you’ll never have to beg friends or family for reviews, or even have to give away products to launch services again, saving you a lot of time and money!

…you can up-sell and cross-sell existing customers.  And given that these ‘whale’ customers are often responsible for 80% of an ecommerce venture’s profits, this is just so important and exactly how to grow this business exponentially.

…and perhaps best of all, it means you’re no longer solely reliant on Amazon for customers, thereby dramatically reducing your sales channel risk.

That all sounds great of course, but there’s a slight problem.

It turns out Amazon, that gluttonous ecommerce beast of a company, doesn’t actually share customer emails with us sellers.  Instead, like a crazy-eyed Golem in Lord of the Rings they want the preciooooous/customers all to themselves!

That means you’ll need to find your own ways to obtain customer emails.

Now, there are some really smart ways to do this in the course, including using data matching services and Facebook custom audiences.

But the simplest way to start collecting emails is by using ‘product inserts’.

All this involves is getting your supplier to insert a small, but nicely designed piece of paper, into your product packaging that gives the customer an incentive to sign up for your email list.

Typical examples of smart incentives include a product warranty or a $ or % discount on future purchases.

But what I like to do is offer the customer a free (and simple) information product that helps them make better use of the product they just purchased.

e.g. say we sold a cooking thermometer product on Amazon.

Well, then we could include an insert that directed buyers to our website where they could give their email to download a free ebook/PDF/infographic checklist showing the ideal internal temperature for all kind of meats and for different grades of doneness.

How freaking useful!  My brisket loving ass would definitely give my email for that.

These simple information products tend to have much higher conversion rates compared to product warranties and discount offers, whilst also increasing the customer’s love for the product (and thus chance of a good review on Amazon).

Plus the marginal cost of offering them is $0.

Win-win-win!

As you can see product inserts are amazing and if you can, you might even want to look at doing them from day one, i.e. when you order your first product run.

The most important step of our strategy to get right

Before moving on, I want to focus your attention on what I think is the most important step of the 10 step strategy above.  Because if you get this step right, everything else is immensely easier.

The step I’m talking about of course is the first step…

…make sure you pick the right sub-niche and then the right first product within that niche.

Without this, you could nail every other step and still end up with no sales.

So if you haven’t done so already, download the top 100 Amazon product ideas (just enter your email below the video to get the PDF).

This resource has had 100s of hours of product research go into it, so it is definitely worth your attention.

Unfortunately, most people don’t do any of the steps above

Instead they choose high competition niches/sub-niches and products, don’t do any customization, go to market with a ‘me too’ product, fail to hustle for initial reviews, have no clue about the launch services to use and are way too weak with their Amazon PPC.

No wonder most people fail harder at this business than Ludacris’ last hip hop album!  (C’mon man, just retire already, how many more roasts from Jeff Ross can you take?!)

And no wonder you read about so many people on Reddit – and god knows where else – complaining that this passive income opportunity is all BS.

But now you know the rough outlines of the strategy.  And hopefully you can see how formulaic and relatively easy it can be to pull off.