Got to $40k/Month, and got screwed

The brand in question will never be on sale ever again, so i’ll try to be as open as possible without breaking the rules: Main ASIN: B0D3853B7S Toiler Paper Niche, one of the hardest to get into with PL due to high MOQs, high sales volume needed just to stay relevant and get a few organic sales. So, briefly (not so much), the story goes like this: Back in November 2022, uni student, someone contacted me on a Fiverr gig where i was offering supplier research. They had an idea for a bamboo toilet paper brand and a few product specs. All seemed legit, so why not? They somehow got impressed by my work (in retrospect, maybe they just didn’t know how to do anything), so they wanted me to be their Project Manager, and as a broke uni student that was great since they “paid” well (much lower than they should have, but in Italy you can only dream about anything more than 8/9€ per hour, so this was miiiiiiiles better). It didn’t take long to realize that they knew nothing, had no plan at all, and they basically wanted to dump the entire business on me. The only thing they had was Money. I thought i got lucky, i get to run my own business with someone else’s money? Hell Yeah! (i always wanted to try FBA, so not being exactly “my own business” didn’t bother me) From that point, i handled literally everything: Suppliers, Samples, Design, Import, Logistics, Amazon, Imgs, Copy, PPC, etc… (you know how difficult it is to set up an account for someone else, that answers like once a month?) After two full years of sampling and planning (as i said before, the owner would answer like once a month, wouldn’t read reports or take calls, just whatsapp messages, and only like a single question was answered each time. Almost like they had a cooldown for thinking even a little…), we launched in October 2024. No review-building, no Vine, no “warmup” period. They wanted an immediate launch as soon as inventory was received. Well before launch, i did an intensive market study and sent the owner detailed reports with sales forecasts, costs, and investment needs: $30–40k sales, around 10k PPC, a Total spend of around 100k, including amz fees, ppc, new production order double the size of the launch one, which itself was 30k with shipping. Break even wasn’t expected before Q4 2025, and i was VERY CLEAR about this, mentioning it at least once a month all the way from 2022 to launch, and even after. It’s simply impossible from the get go, as amz fees are like 50+%, production and shipping 20%, and ACOS would be huge since we had no reviews and majority of customers are brand loyal, or expect some form of validation before trying a new brand. The only way to be profitable is to plan long term, build subscriptions and brand recognition, and switch to a website after a few years. Again, all of this was made very very clear, and was accepted by the owner. But we did have a very good product though, and the start was incredible. Not a single day without sales, consistent growth week over week. Month 1 we did $15k, month 2 was 23k, month 5 38k, total in first 8 months was around 200k, aCoS was stable at 40% a month after launch, brought it down to 20% by the end (without counting subscriptions). By the end of the First Week of November, we already had to order the second batch, double the size, costing us around 55k. This should be where i’m like “that’s it, everything went perfectly, we’re making millions now, i’m just here to brag, bla bla bla”.... Naah, everything went to S**t almost immediately after we started… Turns out it wasn’t the owner’s money, but we had an investor, and the owner never shared any of my reports (all the market analysis, expectations, etc..) with them and somehow PROMISED profit within 2 months of launch and break-even in the first month, both literally impossible unless they wanted like 2 sales a day in the middle of the night when competitors didn’t run ads. Sooo the investor pulled out in November, covering only half the cost of the new batch. This forced me to manually slow sales in December and January to avoid running out of stock: Dec 16k, Jan 29k (started ramping up again). When the inventory finally arrived beginning of February, we hit $38k in both February and March, difference being that March was at break even, as i completely shifted our strategy and brought the aCoS down enough to be self sustainable, and enough to make the brand survive. (Hell, i could write an entire 100 page book about the second order, and i don’t mean the selling part, i mean the ordering itself, it was such a clusterf*** than noone would believe it) Also i never received any pay from November onwards, but i kept working purely to keep the brand alive as i believed it had potential (and was naively promised 30% of ownership if we survived)... BUT even though i managed to do so, and the brand was by then expected to do $800k in 2025, the owner suddenly stopped replying entirely (still active on IG, so it’s not like they died or anything), and without access to the company’s bank account, i couldn’t pay the suppliers myself, so i let the products sell out without PPC until inventory ran out. In the end the owner still walked away with ~$25–30k profit in the final months, abandoned what could have been a 7-figure brand, still owes me like $25k, and not a single care in the world. I did everything perfectly, all my economic predictions came true, even the revised ones, achieved an unthinkable thing by getting profitable much earlier without sacrificing sales, but i made a single mistake… I never signed a contract…yeah, i know… That’s it for the rant, if anyone wants to see any report i might have, launch forecasts, or other stuff, i’m happy to share. I still have Seller Central access (for now, probably going to get deactivated soon), so i can post whatever’s left on there before it’s gone.