We did everything right and only broke even. Twice.
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Turn on any video about Amazon FBA or log into any course, and everyone is saying essentially the same thing. There are some base rules: shoot for a product between $25 and $50. Keep it small and lightweight, because that keeps shipping and warehousing fees low. Look for something with low competition but high enough sales volume.
Fine. That's market research in any field, as it's always been. What I think we've forgotten is that it's also the starting line, not the finish.
What I want to share this week is what took us from being Amazon sellers scraping by on a side hustle to a $10 million business. Overnight, with one product concept, we took the same product idea that had been making us side hustle money and turned it into our first million-dollar year. And if we'd only followed what we learned in that course (it was the Amazing Selling Machine, and to be fair, all of it is accurate and the methodology is correct), I don't think we would have ever made it out of side hustle territory or have the life we have today.
This is that story.
Where we were
We were coming off our year of travel around the world, the honeymoon. We'd saved up for two years, $30,000 each, and $60,000 lasted eleven months before we ran out of money and came back to the States to get "real jobs."
Tim landed in a sales job making $27,000 a year, which, just wow. But the bonus was that he only had to be in the office from 9:00 to 3:30, which left plenty of hours in the day to work on Amazon. And thank God we had a friend at the time who shared his login to a $5,000 course we couldn't afford, because in 2017 there weren't hundreds of YouTube videos on how to start an Amazon business. That was how you learned.
So Tim went through the lessons, one at a time, after work. And I want to be clear about this part: he did them well.
Product one: the backpack
One of the recommendations you've probably heard is that you want to differentiate your product a little bit. Sure. So coming off a year of travel, we made a backpack. It was differentiated because it was packable, this cool nylon backpack that folds down into a little pouch you can throw in your suitcase, so you have a day bag on your trip without using it as your carry-on. We still have it in the product line today.
It launched in May and started profiting about $10 a day, which was kind of fun. Obviously along the way we were learning all the things Amazon, and at this point it was 100% Tim: the supply chain, how many units to order, how to make listing photos, where to hire a product photographer. There's a lot of work that goes into just getting to the point of a first product.
It wasn't that profitable, because it wasn't differentiated enough. It was still pretty much a commodity. But it wasn't a failure either. Tim learning supply chain, product creation, managing an order, developing relationships with manufacturers, all of that was invaluable. So there we were, $5,000 to $10,000 into an inventory order and hoping we could at least break even, which we essentially did. Not too bad. Free business lessons.
Product two: the compression cube
So we went back to the drawing board. What wasn't profitable about product one? We decided it was a little too much of a commodity, so we'd go more niche.
Well, we'd just spent eleven months living out of an Osprey Porter 46-liter backpack with a few pieces of clothing and two pairs of shoes for the whole year. And we were living out of compression packing cubes. If you don't know what those are, it's a nylon pouch with an extra zipper that compresses the contents down. At the time they were mostly popular with overnight hikers, camping equipment for keeping clothes organized and out of the way in a pack, and they'd become popular with the round-the-world backpacker community for the same reason. We had fallen in love with them, because they kept the wrong-weather clothes out of the way and the dirty clothes away from the clean ones.
All of which is to say: those eleven months were product research on one very specific, very niche product, and we didn't know it.
So when we asked ourselves what product we actually knew and understood, the answer was compression packing cubes. It also hit every one of the "Amazon rules" for beginners. It was niche. It was differentiated, because a compression cube has that extra zipper versus a regular cube. It was small and lightweight. All the nails on the head.
Tim got them in stock, hired a product photographer off Upwork (we tried to build our own studio in the second bedroom of that apartment with the gross carpeting, using white sheets and the camera gear from the trip, and it turns out studio product photography is complicated, so that got hired out immediately), and the cubes started doing a little better than the backpack. We were making $50 a day and getting excited enough to think we should go out to dinner.
Why did it work better? In 2017, in a niche category like that one, being a private label product was differentiated enough. There were well-known brands, the ones you'd find at REI or Backcountry, and there were a few really cheap knock-offs, and each was reflected in the price. We came in at the middle price point with great branding. We're travel YouTubers; we know how to shoot lifestyle photos, and we put that into the listing. We had the same quality as the big brands at a lower price, and we were clearly the better option than the cheap ones. And we were basically the only product sitting in that middle.
Where most people "fail"
This is the place I see a lot of people quit. You've gone through all of it, finding a manufacturer, product design, the photographer, learning to be an Amazon seller. Tim had put all of his second eight hours a day, after his real job, into this for six months, hardcore. And the profit at the end of it, if you're sitting in a decent salary job, might not look worth your while.
For us, taking home $27K and coming off a year of running out of money, we were happy. We just needed dollars. But that's also what made us so hungry, and what pushed us into product three. When you're coming from a place of "it doesn't matter anymore, I need something," it's like interviewing when you don't have a job. It's so much easier than sending out your resume from a mediocre one.
I know exactly what that in-between place looks like, because we kept those two products. We still sell the backpack and that two-piece compression cube set, a small and a large. Together they do maybe $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Certainly not worth building an entire business around a capped earning potential like that.
So here's the first year. Tim started the course in January 2017. By May he'd launched the backpack, soon after the cubes, and through December Tripped did about $30,000 in revenue. Roughly $15,000 of that was profit before the photographer and the course, so call it $7,000 to $10,000. We paid to learn the business model.
The number from the next year
The next year we did $735,000 in revenue, at about a 50% profit margin. The year after that was $1.25 million, with no change in products.
So what took us from $30K to $735K?
The mindset. I've already told you: we were hungry, aggressive for cash, in 5,000% hustle mode. We were also desperate to be location independent again, because we'd just quit our jobs to travel and all we wanted was to get back on the road. Not afraid of failing, willing to go all in, and willing to try the next thing quickly. That last part matters more than it sounds.
The math. The retail price on products one and two was $19.95 and $24.95, which was the bottom of the bar for Amazon at the time, and honestly isn't even doable now. The idea with product three was to create enough value for the customer that we could merit a $45 retail price. So the product idea came out of changing the price target in our heads first and then asking: what would a product look like that deserves that? A higher retail price means a higher margin, which means you can run more ads, reach a customer who's looking for quality, and a lot more.
The model. The compression cubes were going fine, so we weren't looking for a different product. We had the same seller experience across two categories, and we were still feeling good about knowing everything there is to know about compression cubes. So we stayed in the family we knew.
And then we did something that came from Marketing 101 at Michigan State, not from an Amazon course. What business school teaches you is the customer's point of view: what problem is the product solving? So instead of the Amazon-course lens ("make sure it's under two pounds, and so on"), we asked why anyone buys a compression cube at all.
Product three: the carry-on set
This was right when carry-on travel was becoming a thing. Airlines had started charging for checked bags, prices were going up, and packing cubes were in an early-adopter phase. Way more people know what a packing cube is today than did in 2017.
So who was actually buying them? Not the backpacker-camping crowd, and not the tiny number of people like us who live out of a backpack for a year. The 50,000 searches a month we were seeing in Jungle Scout were coming from somewhere else. With a little keyword research, we found it: people were searching for packing cubes for carry-on travel.
That gave us the story. Instead of paying $50 for a checked bag, this customer was willing to go carry-on only. Funny enough, $50 was the exact retail price we'd been aiming for. So all of a sudden the whole pitch became: instead of paying $50 to check a bag, buy a $50 set of packing cubes and never check one again.
What that looked like in product development: Tripped became the first compression cube listing on Amazon with six packing cubes in the set, instead of the two-piece set every other listing had. We called it the carry-on set. The dimensions and sizes were designed as puzzle pieces that fit a standard carry-on suitcase.
And our million-dollar business was born out of that. A six-piece set instead of a two-piece set.
Behind the scenes, it solved the exact problem we'd set out to solve. We wanted a $45 to $50 retail price, and the best way to get there is to create real value for the customer at a low added cost to us. We were already in it for $10 or $11 a unit, and including a few more cubes cost very little but was enormously valuable to the person buying. Bundle and save, which exists everywhere already, but ours was intentional. The customer had a no-brainer option built around the specific problem that brought her to Amazon in the first place.
On a day-to-day basis, that took us from consistently $100 a day in profit to consistently $500 a day and beyond. That December, a year and a half in, we did $250,000 in revenue for the holiday season alone.
There were other factors. It was a new category, and we rode the wave of a product becoming popular. But that was because we were in a niche we understood, and because we understood the customer.
The four elements (and why most courses only teach two)
This is how I teach it inside FBA EDU. Four elements, and every Amazon course and YouTube video I've seen covers two of them. It's the other two that took us from side hustle to million-dollar business. I call it the MUSE method, and it reads backwards, so work with me.
E is expertise. Without the eleven months of living out of compression cubes, we wouldn't have known why a customer buys one, and that's where the product idea came from. Not from hours in Jungle Scout. From our own experience.
S is search. Yes, it comes down to keyword research. But the research that mattered wasn't "100,000 people searched this," it was the story inside the keyword: packing cubes for carry-on travel. That's the why.
U is the unicorn. Elevating your product into a category of one. This is what kept us at product two. We had the expertise, we had the keyword, and we were still a side hustle, because we were doing compression cubes like everyone else. Better photos, more colors, "packing cubes for women," that's all fine, but it doesn't get you out of side hustle territory. No other listing on Amazon had a six-piece set. We didn't change the product. We told the manufacturer to put a couple more in the bag. That was the difference between $30K and a million.
M is margin. For us it came first, because we started with a price target. But if you don't have a product yet, you can go through the first three, and once you've elevated into a category of one, you get to pick the price, because you don't have a direct competitor. The customer finds you, you're the obvious answer to her exact problem, and paying more for you is actually the higher-value choice for her. That's not selling a higher-quality product to make more money. That's a real win-win.
If you haven't started yet
I hope this gets you into the right frame of mind, and first of all doesn't scare you. Even when you "fail," you're learning. That first year taught us how Amazon works, and inventory that isn't your million-dollar product still moves if you lower the price. It's not like you order $7,000 of product and lose $7,000. There's always someone looking for a deal.
And with all the information overload about how to find the right product: I don't think of it as finding a product. There's a time and place for sitting down with your own thoughts, and every product that has ever launched, Amazon or not, came from somebody sitting with a customer problem and creating a solution. Products that already exist and solve the problem, with you as one more of them, is called a side hustle. You sitting down and elevating it into a category of one is what gives you the million-dollar idea.
That's what the Founder's Journal is for. It breaks down all four MUSE elements so you can figure out what they mean for you, with exercises where you map out the expertise that makes you a unique customer of a certain kind of product, so you have a foundation before you ever pay for a research tool and stare at a blank search bar wondering whether to type in "pet products." You start with your own expertise. It's 75 pages, and you can order the physical journal or download it.
And if you'd rather hear this whole story told, it's this week's episode of $2740.
It's on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple, whichever you've already got open.
Happy hunting. And if you already have a product and feel like you failed because it isn't a million-dollar business yet, maybe this helps you tweak what you already have into the thing that replaces your salary.
— Fin
