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Comment by ssanders82 | Hacker News Reader

the article says "his business is making seven-figure profits"

Hmm. Seems unlikely given the manual nature of shopping at WalMart, shipping costs, returns, etc, on an $8M revenue base.

Edit: He contradicts himself..."four years later, we're a team of 11 and we're doing well over $200,000 in sales per month"

$200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year. And you aren't netting 7 figures with $200k/month and 11 employees. Now I'm thinking this is just a puff piece for his get-rich-quick lecture series. Too bad, as it's probably still a decent story with the actual figures. Just not a rags to riches one.

I'm also having trouble visualizing 11 people buying $8M (retail) worth of stuff from WalMart in shopping carts. That's $2k per day, per employee, every day.

This "company" may be doing something else, additionally to these flipping schemes. Seminars are mentioned. Consulting may be something else. Or some other form of ecommerce.

"Seminars are mentioned"

Ahh, yes, of course.

So, if you knew how to make money doing x and genuinely wanted to share that info, how would you do so effectively without being perceived as a scam artist?

Here's his landing page: https://ose.teachable.com/p/how-to-make-your-first-1-000-sel...

Your call on whether it's a genuine desire to share his success.

That in no way answers my question.

Do it for free, perhaps

I am trying to do exactly that. One establishment would not post the flyer "because it might be a pyramid scheme." So simply being free seems insufficient.

But, thank you.

Well and of course free sometimes begs "so what's the catch"

In which case very cheap sometimes works. Like, "I'm not looking to make money but help me cover gas and venue rental"

Not in this case. I live in a town with a high unemployment rate and lots of homeless. I am newly off the street and would like to help people in dire straights. They don't have money to spare.

Maybe present it as a barter deal?

Well, at the moment, I am just trying to direct people to a couple of websites. I have created flyers and I am looking for bulletin boards to post them. I would be willing to do meet-ups or something.

Maybe if I were representing some religious organization, people might buy that I am just well meaning. But, I don't do religion.

If you were associated with a nonprofit / charity that seems like it would go a long way to convincing people you are on the level.

Hire them into your business. Teach them the ropes. Then turn them loose with some seed money.

I work for a service called Textbroker. Unlike Upwork, it is not a race to the bottom. You can start off making very little and grow your income, potentially to a middle class level. It helped me get off the street.

I sometimes recommended them to online friends who had just lost a job or whatever, but they didn't get it. They didn't see what I saw.

So, I started a blog to try to explain how to make it work for you:

http://writepay.blogspot.com

I also have a longstanding homeless site:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com

I created flyers:

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/2017/10/sp...

A couple of people I know socially are interested and have given me some useful feedback. I updated the flyers and one website because of the feedback I got.

I think I need to make local contacts and establish trust. Maybe do some volunteer work. I am not sure.

I would like to start here, but also actively encourage people to get into things like Etsy. There is good internet service in this town. But, I think they just need to get the word that it can be done. Remote work and gig work seems to be kind of big city, cosmopolitan culture. This is an area that historically did a lot of logging and fishing.

There is interest in, for example, IT related meetups. But nothing seems to actually be happening.

This is exactly spot on.

The article is just content marketing for him to sell his "get rich with an FBA business" course.

Not only that but, I don't know about Walmart specifically, but retailers tend to ban high volume resellers.

> $200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year.

It doesn't say $8M/year, it says $8M total sales by the end of this year. So from the founding of his company, to the end of this year.

>$200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year.

He said $8M total (over 4 years), not $8M a year.

If one is going to discredit the article, at least they could read it carefully.

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