Ok I get that this kind of sounds like a clickbait subject line, but this lesson is literally what I've built my entire FBA EDU business around.
We talked in an earlier email about our goldilock-and-three-bears journey to finding "the perfect product".
Well for us that took trial and error, which took about 12 months and about $20,000 in inventory (most of that we made back at-cost).
After the backpack "flopped", Tim and I made our own version of the compression packing cubes we'd lived out of for a year. Better fabric, better zippers, our brand colors, a clean two-piece set. It did okay.
That's the word I would have used at the time. *Okay.*
Not a flop. Not a hit. Just okay. Tripped at that time was still just this "side-hustle" that consumed 20 hours a week but wasn't paying us back enough to 'be worth it'.
The dream was still very alive because we were moving inventory, but it wasn't actually moving toward becoming a profitable life-changing business.
I think that's actually the hardest period of building any business. Not the failure. Not the breakthrough. The middle. The "okay".
And here's the expensive part: each round of trying to break through cost us real money. We didn't just *think* about new versions. We *bought* them. New inventory orders. New packaging. New samples. New shipping.
Across the failed backpack and the modest cubes and the abandoned iterations in between, we spent close to $20,000 learning what we eventually learned for free in a single conversation: *we were asking the wrong question.*
Twenty thousand dollars. Twelve months of nights and weekends. To figure out something that, in retrospect, is so obvious now and I've built my entire business around it.
We knew we needed to change something again. Did that mean a new third product to try?
We were doing what our online course and all the Youtube videos told us to do: make a premium product in a non-competitive space- but no.
Finally, we came up with our own approach - we started with: the customer. A lesson you learn in business school: you're not selling a product, you're selling a solution.
The solution the customer wants isn't "packing cubes", the solution the wants is "to fit everything for a trip into a carry-on suitcase".
We just stopped looking at what our competitors were selling and were the first to create an entire *carry-on packing system*. 6 cubes, perfectly engineered to fit inside a carry-on. Named it that way. Marketed it that way. Listed it that way.
The business that had been doing *okay* for six months became a million-dollar product in three years.
Here's why I'm telling you about the $20,000.
The pattern was clear once I could see it: every product we had ever launched, mine or anyone else's, succeeded or failed for the same four reasons. Either it had real Margin, a real Unicorn (a category-of-one improvement), real Search demand, and real Expertise behind it — or it didn't. Products with all four worked. Products with three of four generated revenue but never real profit. Products with two or fewer were our backpacks. They failed.
That's the methodology I now teach. It's called MUSE. I built it because I realized the entire $20,000 — the eighteen months, the wrong inventory, the confusion — was avoidable. We only had this "make a premium product methodology" taught by the Amazon influencers. We learned a much more valuable methodology by creating a million dollar product ourselves.
Now, you can skip past the entire learning process by incorporating these four elements into your own business.
The MUSE Method is the methodology I built so that founders coming after me can skip the *okay* phase. So you can run a potential product through four specific tests *before* buying inventory, instead of buying inventory and then learning over months whether it'll sell.
Fin
FBA EDU
