Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

I sell a niche music accessory on FBA. I didn't have many reviews, and it was hard to gain traction as a result.

I found a very relevant subreddit and offered to send a sample to anybody who was willing to leave an honest review, up to 10 total. I got very enthusiastic responses, and sent out the samples.

Every review that I received from this group was five stars. I at no time asked for five stars, and was very explicit about asking them to be honest. Maybe my product is just that good, but I suspect there's at least a little bias there.

More to the point, every organic review I've received since has been five stars, which leads me to think there's a crowd effect going on.

I think what I did was a good deal less scummy that what ReviewKick et al do, since they explicitly find "good" reviewers for you, and the reviewers aren't necessarily knowledgeable about the product or niche. That said, even my targeted approach yielded a lot of bias.

For what it's worth, this exercise doubled my sales. I now effectively earn the equivalent of a full time minimum wage job through one tiny niche product, and an hour's work every couple of months.

Out of curiosity, what do you sell that takes you half an hour per month to manufacture but sells for enough to make a living?

Honestly it's easy enough to duplicate that I don't want to describe the product itself on HN of all places. :)

But I will say that FBA is very easy to get into. If you ever find yourself thinking "I wish that exists" about a relatively simple product, and can't find it already on Amazon, jump on to Alibaba and source a factory that makes something similar and ask them if they'll make what you want.

And there's the bit that makes me never want to get into FBA. Half the sellers won't even mention what they sell because their business is so indefensible that if someone found out and competed it would no longer be profitable.

Doesn't strike me as particularly sustainable. Especially if you have all your eggs in Amazon's basket given their willingness to take over entire product lines with their own brand.

This used to be my feeling too, but I changed my mind when I worked with a company doing just what you describe. They grew it to a 50-people company within 5 years. Initially I felt smarter than them and wondered how on earth they could have put all their eggs in the same basket in such a way.

Then I realized that with the money they had, they had been able to hire me to do this work, so perhaps I wasn't the smartest guy in the room after all...

The thing to understand is that capitalism is about identifying opportunities to accumulate the largest amount of capital in the shortest amount of time.

The truth is if you focus only on "logical", sustainable, defensible, infinitely scalable business models, you'll be missing out a good 60% of the opportunities.

If you could let's say accumulate $600,000 in 5 months with a non viable business, you'd have all the time in the world to work on the viable businesses you mention.

In capitalism, you rarely know for sure which game the other person is playing. It's not because she is moving cards around that she is playing cards.

So the bottom line of my comment is don't be too smart . Being able to make dumb money is as important - if not more important - than being able to make smart money.

And I can even say : making dumb money at the right time is more valuable than making smart money at the wrong time.

Fair enough on your main point. But I'll ask the obvious question... What stopped you or the other employees who understood how the business worked from sourcing the same or similar products and competing?

I won't mention basic things like non-competition clauses, honesty etc... The majority of people are usually honest - especially those senior enough to be exposed to this kind of secrets / overview.

But past that starting a business, especially a physical product one is not a trivial thing to do. You need to be very motivated. Like with software you discover many time-consuming details as you implement. And here not everything can be automated once solved. Even established competitors do not copy as fast as one may think because of these forces.

It might be dumb money but it still isn't easy money - and that's what make it even dumber : why not invest the effort in something "better" someone will say.

Great point r2dnb. This used to be my mentality as well and it hurt me.

I was looking for a "smart" business that was "worthy" of me. How could these people spend so much time on such an indefensible & unscalable process?!

Well, the joke was on me. My brother stopped consuming info and started Amazon FBA. And he does really well (full-time job replacement). Instead of waiting for the perfect idea - he executed.

Now I'm happily off my high horse and trying to follow in his footsteps.

Lesson learned - there is no perfect business. Get started with something simple and build from there.

Great article on this incremental approach for anyone interested: http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2015/03/26/the-stairstep-approa...

There's no such thing as a sustainable business. Every business is in the process of being commoditized (some are further along than others); in essence every business is an arbitrage (this thing can be done more cheaply than what it costs). The niche will exist for a while and then it will vanish. You can either make hay while the sun shines, or not.

It's a fair point, but as long as you "diversify your portfolio" it seems reasonably sustainable. And, the product is only as good as the effort you devote to sourcing...I went through a good half dozen factories before I found one with the options I ended up with on this particular product, and iterated on some of the variables for a few months before settling on what works well in practice. Somebody could duplicate what I sell, but unless you're also a user in this niche (as I am) you might miss some subtleties that make the product good. I have a couple more complex products that have been in "r & d" for the best part of 2016, and I'm still not close to market with them (if I was doing this as an actual full time job then for sure it would have taken less time). There's enough cheap shit on Amazon...I think it's worth doing the legwork to ensure quality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/guitarpedals/comments/4h2dy0/uflavo...

@dang. Flagging this comment for the same reasons listed elsewhere in this thread.

> Every review that I received from this group was five stars

There is a certain bias effect to consider.

When you purchase something, your criteria for it to meet your expectations is a bit higher (subconsciously) than if it was given to you for free.

Also I suspect that people who leave positive reviews for products that they get receive more products to review.

In the review kick model, yes. For the folks interested in my product, not so much... They were niche enthusiasts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com