- Inspired by successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, I decided to try my hand at selling on Amazon.
- I set a budget of $5,000, enough to start something basic and an amount I felt comfortable losing.
- Partnering with a friend doubled the budget and now we have $10,000 to work with.
Reporting on financial independence for three years has introduced me to a number of strategies for making money.
Here is the classic buy and hold real estate approach, which has always intrigued (but also scared) me. There are lesser known strategies like franchise investmentwhich may require a significant upfront investment, and flipping sneakerswhich can be low budget but time intensive.
And then there is e-commerce, which I found to be more accessible – and with a lot of positive potential.
One entrepreneur, Shan Shan Fu, told me how she does it $40,000 in monthly income from selling socks and tights on Amazon; another, Joe Reeves, design a minimal portfolio that brings in more income in one month than he did in a whole year from his day job. They both started their own e-commerce companies as side hustles.
Sure, it took time and commitment to create a product and build a brand, but their descriptions of opening stores on Amazon seemed relatively straightforward. Fu, who has a background in counseling, relied on free YouTube videos to get started. Reeves signed up for Helium 10, a popular software that Amazon sellers use to grow their online businesses. Included in the subscription is an online FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) course that he commissioned.
These conversations got me thinking: Is it easy to start a profitable business on Amazon?
Were these e-commerce steps just that: whistling? Or, can anyone – including a 31-year-old journalist with a few savings and a few unpaid hours after work – make money selling things online?
I decided to find out for myself and document every detail of the process from start to finish.
I team up with a friend to double my $5,000 budget
When I thought about how much of my own money I wanted to invest in this experiment, $5,000 seemed reasonable. It was enough to launch something (after all, Fu started her Amazon store with just $2,000), and it was an amount I felt comfortable losing if no one ended up buying my product.
A bigger budget would be better – I’d always heard that startups cost twice as much and take twice as long as you think – and there seemed to be an easy solution: Double the founders to double the budget.
My co-founder, a friend and former roommate, was not hard to find. He lived 10 steps away from me at the time in our three bedroom apartment in LA. Both former college tennis players, we met playing a different racquet sport called paddle tennis at Venice Beach. Like me, he spent more time teaching tennis rather than playing it since graduation. Our laundry room, which doubled as shared storage space, was overflowing with racquets, racquets, and tennis shoes.
We had been toying with the idea of starting an e-commerce business since the spring of 2023, when I mentioned one of the Amazon stories I was working on. He was just as curious as I was and also had the savings and bandwidth to devote to a side project. Doubling the founders would mean not only doubling the budget, but doubling the skills and doubling the network.
Our third roommate was also an entrepreneur, juggling several side hustles outside of his day job. That spring, our common room turned into a war room. Some of our early steps included messing around with Helium 10, researching products in high demand, and reaching out to Alibaba to figure out how to find and communicate with manufacturers.
The project slowed down when I moved to NYC that summer. We lost our war room and, with it, our momentum, but we re-committed in the winter of 2023. We made a financial commitment—we would each put up $5,000 of our savings—and reached out to industry experts for advice. The more people we told about our project, the more compelled we felt to pursue it.
We needed all the responsibility we could get. Anyone can dream up an idea in their common room—that’s the fun and easy part—but taking that idea and turning it into something tangible takes dedication, drive, and guidance. The execution part is the really hard part, especially when you’re both working full-time, have steady paychecks, and not necessarily need business to work.
However, it’s half the hard work with the right partner.