State of the Fishe 2022

What happened this year?

Welcome back!

As the year is coming to a close, I wanted to look back and see where I was the last time I wrote one of these posts and share the current state of my arbitrage business.

I’m not going to go much in detail with the numbers since I usually reserve that for my P&L reports, so this is more so a general outline of what I accomplished and what I plan to do next.

2022 Goals

Previously, I had set two goals for this year:

• $100k sales on Amazon

• Help 10 people do 100k sales on Amazon

In regards to the first goal, I think it’s pretty safe to say that I cleared the bar:

I’m still shocked that I was able to grow as much as I did this year, despite how many days I felt like I wasn’t putting in enough effort.

In regards to the second goal, I’m not sure if I can really know but I’m going to go out and say that I didn’t reach it. While it sounded realistic at the time, it does rely on other people taking action and is more or less outside of my control - the content is out there and I answered plenty of DMs.

That being said, the few people who did reach out to me and ask questions have seen significant progress in their business and are looking to break out in the following year.

Of the people that DMed me and I’m aware of, collectively they did over $60,000 in revenue. This is in confirmed screenshots, with others telling me that they’re doing mid 4 figure months in DMs. I could arguably say the number is higher, but the point of the goal was to get other people selling on Amazon and earning wifi money - which I think I achieved.

Main Accomplishments

Here’s a list of notable things I did with my business this year:

• $700,000+ in revenue (including two $100k months)

• Hired a team of 4 virtual assistants from the Philippines

• Outsourced my FBA prep to free up 2-3+ hours per day

• Hired my friend from Brazil as a part time worker

• 2,000+ Twitter followers

• 750 Substack subscribers

• Launched a course with 50 videos

Overall, I think the major growth period for my business is over - I highly doubt that I’ll have another year where my revenue goes up by over 1000%. I still plan on growing, but I don’t think any year will be like this one moving forward.

Since I would like to quit my 9-5 next year, I’m going to start paying myself a salary instead of reinvesting all of my profits and see where that takes me - I’ve spoken with an accountant and will be paying for a year-round bookkeeping service as well. This also means that going forward, my P&L reports will be legitimate and not estimates (I may consider putting them behind a paywall because of this).

Lessons Learned

Prep Bad

I think the biggest lesson I learned this year is the value of paying for other people’s time. In college, I learned how to be a frugal bro and planned on saving most of my income so I could retire in my late 30s. With this mindset, I thought I could do everything myself to save money.

Boy, was I wrong. It was fine at first, but once I started doing 3-4 FBA shipments a week I was spending 3 hours at a time putting stuff in bags, putting stickers on my items, boxing them up, cutting up the boxes, and then dragging them onto the front porch where the UPS guy would come pick them up.

Getting a prep center was the highest ROI investment I made in my business this year. Instead of spending 15-20 hours a week boxing stuff, I pay a small family in Montana to do it for me (God bless them). This gave me more time to source profitable inventory, help my VAs improve at sourcing, and actually have some time to myself.

A lot of people on this side of the internet will tell you that you need to be hustling 24/7. I think it’s very important to put time in every day, but after 2-3 hours the time you put in starts to become less efficient and you get diminishing returns (for me at least). Find the 2-3 hour period of your day where you can work the most efficiently, and spend that time doing focused work.

VAs - You Get Out Exactly What You Put In

This year I also hired a team of virtual assistants to help me with sourcing, and I learned the value of putting time into your employees.

In March, I hired a guy off of onlinejobs.ph who claimed to have experience with product research. With this in mind, I let him go off on his own and source for me for 3 months without any proper training or feedback. Needless to say, I didn’t get the results I wanted.

After that, I started paying FastTrack FBA to hire / train VAs for me. Even after their one week training period, we did a month of daily calls where I would review the items they found, give them feedback, and showed them alternative ways to source products. The difference was night and day.

I recently wrote a post about this topic which you can read here, but to sum up you can’t expect your employees to know what you want unless you tell them and give them the resources that will help them succeed.

FBM is Underrated

I wrote a thread about this yesterday, but FBM is massively overlooked by arbitrage sellers. Being able to quickly cycle through your inventory (especially in Q4) can give you a massive leg up over other sellers.

I was selling 80+ units a day at the beginning of this month with FBM, and I somehow was kicking myself for not buying enough when I was scared of buying too much a few weeks prior.

Next Q4, I am gonna go sicko mode with FBM - just you wait.

2023 Goals

Here’s what I plan to do next year:

• 1.5 million dollars in revenue

• 5,000 Twitter followers

• Launch a TikTok *barf*

• Launch a coaching program of some kind (I’ve been getting some requests in DMs but I’m not sure how I want to approach this, need to make sure it’s a quality service)

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As always, I can be easily reached via Twitter or Discord. I’m willing to help you out as long as you ask specific questions and not stuff like “how do I find items” or “do you think i can sell this?”.

Let’s kick some ass in 2023.