My journey to becoming an Amazon seller started when I was doing a lot of consulting. It was a great time for me because I was “working for myself” and had landed a few amazing clients. I had also built a small team in India that was handling the junior-level coding tasks and freeing me up to work on business development. My biggest problem was that I wasn’t earning any money as I was building new client relationships or selling existing clients on new projects. I started looking at lots of different “side-hustles” that other entrepreneurs were blogging about. Then, one of those entrepreneurs posted about selling their FBA business. So, I bought it.
I know that’s not the path most people can take but I had been working full time as a software engineer for a decade so I had the capital to invest. The main selling point, however, was the training that was included in the purchase. I wasn’t just buying a product that was already selling on Amazon; I was buying the know-how to keep that business running.
I met with the seller several times over Zoom to talk through the business, get introduced to his suppliers, learn about shipping, etc… He also put together daily, weekly and monthly runbooks of tasks for me to keep the business humming. Those runbooks saved me so much time figuring out what I needed to do to sell on Amazon that I had the bandwidth to learn Amazon’s API and start building tools help other Amazon sellers. Which, if I’m being honest, was what I wanted to do in the first place. For me, selling on Amazon is the best way to understand how to build software to help people sell on Amazon.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be sharing those run books with the readers of this blog. It seems like the easiest way to actually help people improve their sales on Amazon. That’s always been the goal of this project so let’s get after it.
Andrew
Andrew founded Barron Watch Company to build the best tools for Amazon Sellers.