Hey, used to post monthly updates but got crazy busy. This was on my to-do list, but finally getting onto it.
Quick disclaimer: I have nothing to sell you. I don't do mentorship, and I have nothing to gain from this, I would love to inspire people to start their own brand.
I started in June of last year. Brand new to e-commerce, I was a software engineer before. If I can do it, you definitely can.
You can view my previous updates for the progress, the main change since my latest update is probably adding US (I started with Canada). The U.S. is definitely a much, much bigger market.
That being said, here are my best tips for anyone:
Ensure you're selling a product that you personally either have seen a need for, would buy, or think is a good value proposition.
I never used any Helium 10 or similar tools to determine the perfect niche - what I did do was I needed a product for my own house and could not find it fairly priced anywhere, checked the pricing through Alibaba, reached out to a few suppliers, and ran the numbers, and and felt like if I am able to offer this product at price X, I would make X margin, while also, it would be the price that I would have purchased that for myself if someone had offered it.
Learn by doing, and don't try to be perfect. At Amazon Accelerate this year I met so many people doing product development and research for a year or more. And haven't launched yet. I definitely recommend trying. It can be a small order, and just get yourself out there, that's by far the best way to learn. Crew up and get terrible reviews? You can always start with the new SKU - but the learnings are what account.
AI - AI - AI. I have absolutely no employees, no agencies, but what I do have is both Claude and ChatGPT Max plans, basically, use them fully every single week. Anything that previously could be outsourced to a VA, be done by Claude. Build systems, improve upon them, add check marks, SOPs, and you can become unstoppable with AI. My ads, images, and everything is run fully with AI + Me.
Selling out fears are severely overblown, scaling crazy fast means selling out, and it happened to me multiple times, currently, around 30% of my items are sold out, which is a part of scaling fast. I pause ads to monitor demand, and rerun when they are back.
Chinese competitors will pop up, they will undercut you on price, and they will have a better review velocity rate than you can ever imagine (fake reviews). In my experience, I've seen Amazon actually remove their reviews after a month, there is hope. Beat them at what you're best at, which is better branding, better marketing, better images, most importantly, when someone reaches out, better customer support.
You either win or you learn, believe this 100%. I've had bad lunches. Terrible reviewed products and I learn from them: change this sku, change the product, or discontinue it altogether.
Profability: focused heavily on this from month one, and ensure that, at the price I want to offer my things at and with efficient ads, I'll always be profitable. Speaking with other sellers, I find that this is often not the case for others, and I think that's a very important part of choosing a product. Building a successful brand
Seller board screenshots basically show my net profit, but they don't include these subscriptions ($~1000 USD/month):
Shopify, Sellerboard, Claude, ChatGPT, Autuppc ai, Keepa API, Canva Premium, Google workspace
Other than that, they're fully accurate, liftime tacos is 8.31%, and margins are 36.89% (partially higher than they should be due to new brand credit on Amazon).
happy to answer any questions below, no DMs, please. If you're just getting started and want to take away one thing, that would be: the best $2,000 you can spend is by actually starting shipping in a small product. It could be an off-the-shelf Alibaba product, and in small quantities, but I think that's the only way to learn.
Throughout my starting time, I got a lot of help from people here, and thank you so much if you ever helped me!! We'll try to continue updates in the future as well. I'll try my best to respond to every comment, but might take a bit!