I inherited my dad’s Amazon business. Back in the day, they made $2M in revenue. Today, the landscape is vastly different. Amazon allows direct from manufacturer competition, meaning you’re competing with Chinese sellers direct to consumer. It is not possible to beat them, not with your markup. The only products still sustainable in our store is the stuff we manufacture ourselves, with our own brand registry. Just something to think about.

Education is important. It doesn’t need to be a college degree, but having the technical background in your field so that you can build a competent business is vital to your success. I’ve always viewed the traditional educational path to be a process of creating great employees – if you let it. If you use the knowledge learned in school for something better, then it’s worthwhile.

Congrats! That’s a big milestone. The first $100k is hard, the first $1M is even harder, but after that, it gets easier. Don’t give up.

I had great confidence, even as I watched it burn. My first business failed. So did my second one. And my third one. My fourth business made me the high end of six figures, which jump started my fifth business.

Cool concept, but I don’t see how this is any different than asking ChatGPT to summarize a bunch of news posts. You could even point it at a few articles by posting the link to it and it will summarize them for you, for free. You’ll need to somehow add more value proposition to your product, IMO. Forgive me if I misunderstood your product.

In this day and age, there are few ideas that someone else won’t be able to copy. While it’s important to differentiate, you cannot sustain your business that way. Today, I’d argue that your brand matters a lot more and how well you can market it. Case in point, one of my clients is a pepper mill – he made his millions just grinding black pepper and selling it to restaurants and other food-related factories. That is a saturated market, but he had no issues taking a piece of the pie.

$5k is a small price to pay to save yourself $500k down the line from other ridiculous contracts. Don’t waste your time and mental energy trying to collect this small sum. Learn from it and move on, spending your time in more productive ways. You’d probably make a lot more money doing development in the same amount of time you’d waste trying to extract $5k from his dead business.

Honestly, you don’t have to love your business to profit from it. If I were you, I’d think about how to go about scaling it so that you can focus on other ventures or even find something more interesting to do with your current one. Most people work 80% of their time in the business and 20% on the business. If you automate that machine, you can spend 80% on the business and 20% in the business. That to me has been the fun part, at least for my business, rather than the business itself.