Welcome to the 21st edition of Ecom & Life, my takes on ecommerce, business in general and life.
A company I created in 2015 from a $521 investment has now grown to close to $30M a year. It has had a lot of ups and downs and hopefully I have learned some things that can be of value to others. I have no courses to sell or such, mostly seeking positive karma & serendipity.
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I took 5 weeks off from work (well, more like 3), and while I unfortunately failed to reach enlightenment, it still brought up a couple realizations that I think can be useful to anyone.
💰 Business 💰
Lesson : Go full retard
I’ve had calls with another Amazon seller almost weekly since 2015.
From 2015 to 2019, we were ahead of them, in 2020 we were the same size. Now they’re more than twice our size. They also grew 30% last year with a similar headcount to ours. This year they will probably reach 80M€ in annual sales.
The reason became obvious when I compared our erosion graphs to theirs & the number of ASINs they manage (2.5x ours)
This is their 2019 launch performance (products launched in 2019)
This is ours (in €)
You can immediately see the differences.
They added €13.4 million in revenue in 2020, us €4.4 million, reflecting a lot more launches.
They kept most of that added revenue, these 2019 launches bringing €13.4 million in 2020 to €10.3 million in 2023. Our trajectory is much worse, it peaked at €4.4 million in 2020, to land at €1.6 million in 2023.
Obviously they’re not retarded (they’re very smart actually), but the reality is that they did better than us with a much simpler strategy.
Focus on evergreen products (a pillow will still sell in 10 years, a gaming headset won’t)
Launch more products (including a lot of variations)
Manage the products as optimally as possible
While I was busy trying random stuff (getting into retails, investing like crazy on customer service, targeting poorly rated categories, writing a 30 pages playbook, pushing DTC etc…) they stuck to what they could observe right in front of them, not hypotheticals & FOMO.
Now, I think trying random stuff is also what makes it interesting & exciting for me (behold our upcoming kickstarter video) and there is value in doing new things. I am very confident that some of our more ambitious projects will pay off.
But as CEO I (willingly) let myself dragged into way too many side-quests, losing sights of what is ultimately my biggest priority : revenue generation. And for most Amazon businesses that means launching more products.
It’s also really valuable to benchmark oneself to the ones doing better - it would have been easy to look at all the struggling Amazon sellers and throw our hands in the air “well I guess it’s the market”, but there are always outliers. Seek them and understand how they do it.
💪 Health 💪
Lesson : Working is good for the soul
I quickly missed working. I feel like it’s genuinely positive for my mental and, on some level, spiritual health. My pop-evolutionary-psychology-understanding of it is the following : back in cavemen day, if you were not providing anything and only consuming you wouldn’t be too popular.
There is a lot of satisfaction in a. being useful b. exercising your talents.
On an intellectual level I’ve always been conscious that I am extremely fortunate to have the job I have, but feelings of gratitude never come quicker than when you “lose” something.
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Talk to you in the next edition, where we will cover how to have a clear, high functioning brain.