It started with $700 and a laser pointer for cats.
9 years on the US Amazon marketplace. A business built, lost overnight, and rebuilt. Here is the full story, and a bit about life outside of work.
35 · Czech Republic · Engaged · US marketplace only · Amazon SPN member
How it started
In 2016 I quit a corporate job I did not like, with no real plan beyond five months of unemployment support from the Czech government and a decision to figure something out. I tried affiliate marketing, dropshipping to the Czech Republic, dropshipping to eBay, and a stack of courses. I watched YouTube ten hours a day. Nothing worked.
Then I found Amazon FBA, always US-focused content since that is where the American creators I was watching sold. My first listing was a knife sourced from AliExpress. It got taken down the next day for breaking Amazon’s rules. My second was a laser pointer for cats, we had just gotten one at home, and Amazon let me join an existing listing for it as FBM. I woke up to seven units sold overnight. That was the moment it clicked.
I kept doing FBM for a while, which was hard because of delivery times. Then I put almost everything I had, about $700, into a real order from a supplier in China and switched to FBA. It worked, and it grew from there. Always Amazon, always the US market.
The reset
I started teaching friends how to do it too, and we built wholesale businesses together, a mix of China and US sourcing, for about four years. Then a few of them registered their own Amazon accounts from my place. The accounts got linked, and Amazon shut all of us down at once. I lost everything I had built.
I used what I had learned to start freelancing on Upwork, managing Amazon accounts for other sellers. That grew into a small agency doing full account management, A to Z, for people who wanted to sell on Amazon but did not know how. I ran it for a couple of years, then handed off ownership. It is still active today, and it still pays me passively.
Somewhere in there a company in Texas hired me to train their staff to get better results. That is where I realized coaching was what I actually loved, more than running the operation myself. I have been doing it full time since, alongside consulting for agencies and building my Udemy course, now a Bestseller with 4,000+ students.
Life outside Amazon
I am 35 and live in the Czech Republic. I am engaged to my fiancee, and when I am not working, you will usually find me on a bike, playing guitar, or on a video game.
- Cycling
- Video games
- Playing guitar
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