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I did this 5 years ago, thread had 140 comments and I think I replied to everyone. I still get DM questions all the time, so figured I'd post again.
Here's the content of my previous post and Ill give updates on where things stand today.
>Fyi for anyone wondering, I am verified on r /FulfillmentByAmazon
>Happy Friday. Well if you're an entrepreneur, tomorrow isn't really the weekend anyway. Kind of bored today so I thought I would do this!
>A little about me: Got started in internet marketing doing Affiliate marketing, making commissions on affiliate offers from various companies. Got really good at understanding how to market products and services from doing this.
>I realized that I was only making part of the profits simply sending traffic to affiliate offers (2009), so decided to make a product and sell it on amazon (2014). It was fairly successful and after creating many more, I realized I needed to "level up" and make a true brand that is much more than just a product on Amazon. (2016) This had to have all the pieces (graphics, content, product line, some kind of cohesive story/reason etc).
>That "level up" allowed me to pitch to walmart, target, walgreens, cvs, riteaid, kroger, etc, with success in many of the above retailers & more.
>As you can see from the above dates, while I was very successful early on (I pulled 6 figs my first year as an "entrepreneur" in 2009), there was definitely a process. I think I hit 1M/yr sales in 2014, and passed 10M/yr sales in 2017 or so.
>I'll try to answer as many questions as possible. I'd prefer to help you on your business questions than answer questions about mine that may or may not even apply to you.
>Don't follow my youtube channel because I don't have one, and sorry I can't direct you to where you can buy my course because fuck you if you sell courses. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I sold this previous business. Heres the string of events:
After that AMA 5 years ago, We actually had offers to buy us from 1 publicly traded company, and one huge PE backed conglomorate. 1 just talked to us to learn everything about our business, and the other one was legit but in the end gave us a super awful offer (The $ was good but the payout was all on the backend, so if the business didnt continue to perform we'd be SOL on our payments). So they were essentially trying to make a no lose scenario for themselves. It was all good though because our main product was actually slowly dying due to the main ingredient going out of style. Was able to take profits and shove it into other products, and actually ended up making another product line that also hit $10m+ in sales no problem, and was able to get *those* products into retail too, following the same formula.
Instead of selling, I ended up merging with another company in what amounted to a stock-swap, then more recently got my shares bought out by private equity.
In the meantime I had been creating *another* CPG brand, and I've been scaling that rapidly. Its 2.5 years old now and will hit 8-9M in sales this year. If we get lucky maybe 10.
Im happy answer any questions related to:
CPG business
Selling the business
Amazon
Retail
Anything else
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