This new industry is making millionaires… and you could start tomorrow

Dear starters,

Pat Walls here, creator of Starter Story. 

I’m hitting your inbox to share with you the best ideas and insights we've published over the last week.

LAST CHANCE: I'm offering a limited-time deal on Starter Story premium for just $1.51/week, our best deal ever (see below).

It’s not a secret that Amazon is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms in the world, and one of its great strengths is how it allows all kinds of brands to sell in the marketplace. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big company or a newly created DTC brand, your appearance is the same. You can compete head to head with a big brand and beat them, That’s why there are over 5 million marketplace sellers across all Amazon marketplaces.

And with that amount of businesses in the same place, opportunities arise. If you can learn the ins and outs of the platform better than anyone else, there is a big chance that you’ll make a lot of money and we have the stories to prove it.

🥇 How Tom is making $20k/mo ranking products on Amazon

Tom is part of an agency originally dedicated to Google SEO & link building. After seeing every ecommerce store move to Amazon it was clear to them that a specialized Amazon SEO service was needed.

Within 2 years the division has grown to $20k/month, without spending a cent on paid ads. Spent over 1,200 hours on the project before generating the first $1,000 in revenue. Nothing comes easy!

Check out the full story to read his journey. The story is full of learnings and actionable advice if you’re interested in doing something similar.

A world of opportunities offering services for Amazon businesses

There are many multi-million dollar brands that are run by a very small amount of people because Amazon does a ton of heavy lifting.

Lots of these teams are product experts, which opens a world of opportunities through providing services such as SEO, branding, logistics, etc. to these businesses. They know about their product, but it doesn’t matter how good a product is, if you don’t know this marketplace you’ll fail. So they need support.

This opportunity is especially big because Amazon businesses are so plentiful, yet so specific. They all experience the same challenges.

In other words, scale. If you can do a great job for one Amazon brand, you can do the same thing for dozens or hundreds of others. You crack the algorithm to rank on Amazon’s #1 page? You can do that over and over and profit from it!

Here are some cool ideas that come to mind:

1. Amazon SEO consultant → Like our friend Tom
2. Amazon PPC consultant → Danny makes over $100k/mo
3. Amazon product photography → You can make $45k/mo doing this
4. Amazon reviews booster → Many businesses depend on them
5. Amazon TikTok marketer → Kayla doubled the revenue thanks to this
6. Amazon fulfillment → Absolute key business, Ben’s company makes $100k/mo (Plus read below for another great story on this)
7. Amazon logo design → Every brand needs a logo! If you’re in design you should give it a go. Craig created a logo maker for this

Still need some ideas? My tip: Simply research some common challenges that Amazon businesses face. For every challenge, there’s an opportunity.

And the list could go on forever. Dive deeper into our database with thousands of success stories to get even more inspiration.

The order fulfillment business that makes $4.6m/year 

Related to the story above, I’d like to tell you about Chris, who has a friend that sells delicious bread in grocery stores here in Dallas, TX that wanted to start selling online and needed help. It was late 2019, and what started as a favor became a huge opportunity when COVID hit and many food companies lost a lot of their traditional business due to restaurants being closed. This made them start selling online directly to customers. 

In a matter of weeks, they were selling hundreds of loaves per week. Chris recruited Kirk as a partner and started looking at ways to grow the business. To find new customers in the local market they went to Whole Foods and wrote down all the products that were marked as made locally and then just emailed them all, reaching out, explaining who they were, and offering their services. 

After a little more than a year they’ve moved to a 30,000 square foot warehouse, they work with dozens of clients and the business makes $385k/mo. A truly inspiring story.

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🗣 Quote of the week

“When creating a platform, it is very alluring to try to make the value proposition as broad as possible. If you can’t or don’t want to play the VC game, the tighter focus can help you achieve profitable revenue faster and grow without outside investment.”

Daryl Hatton, ConnectionPoint founder
(Crowdfunding-As-A-Service Platform That Helped 200K Projects Raise Over $200M)

🙌 Scratch your own itch

NapoleonCat is an $80k/mo social media management tool. They came up with the idea trying to solve their own problem, which is always great, because probably other people will experience the same. Others succeeded by doing the same:

• Nick created a $3k/mo SaaS tool that helps you rank your website higher in Google
• Steven made a one-word domains search engine that has 35,000 users
• Jared launched his daily micro-journaling cards business after a successful Kickstarter campaign
• This $3k/mo user feedback and customer survey tool
• The half dozen Slack bots (all with paying customers) that Daniel has developed

🌿 An $8.5k/mo feel-good CBD coffee brand

James and Álvaro are the founders of Jibby Coffee. They created their company entirely online for 9 months during the lockdown. CBD is a space with incredible growth due to legislation changes, and we have many examples of starters that built great businesses in it:​

• Gunhee started Populum, a $3M ARR CBD oil company
• Michael and Erin are the co-founders of Dope Dog (awesome name) a $16k/mo CBD dog treats company
• Yanet’s Silk Bombs are making over $25k/mo thanks to taking CBD to the spa world

🛠 Job opportunities

• Growth hackers and great writers at Send Eats, the $385k/month order fulfillment service for ecommerce brands
   
• Warehouse operations and customer support at Turmerry ($150k/mo all-natural and non-toxic bedding products ecommerce)
   
• customer success advisors at NapoleonCat ($80k/month social media management tool)
   
• At Workbooks CRM ($50k/mo) they’re looking to grow their team with different roles.
   
• The India-based Apna Writer is hiring full/part-time writers and editors.
   
• Sasa’s $7k/mo marketplace for no-code jobs needs people in marketing, community-management, and software engineering.
   
• CGI artists and video editors at Silksocial ($30k/mo ecommerce video marketing).
   
• Customer Success Managers and Senior Developers at ConnectionPoint ($150k/mo crowdfunding-as-a-service platform).

P.S. Huge thank you to Klaviyo - our exclusive sponsor at Starter Story. By using Klaviyo, we've grown our email list to 70K and added thousands of dollars in revenue per month through email marketing. Get Klaviyo today!

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