We started an Amazon FBA business so we could travel the world
Quitting our jobs to travel in 2015 was just a quick route to live a temporary life of adventure. However, on the road we continuously had to monitor our budget and always had the looming thought of needing to return back to the states to work. After depleting our $60,000 travel fund it was all over with one flight back to Chicago… or was it?
In our travels we came across so many digital nomads working from cafes to co-working locations running their online businesses.
If they could do it, why couldn’t we?
We started looking at (and attempting) online business models such as: growing our YouTube channel, creating digital products, and working as a consultant.
Tim had some experience working with products in his past career and enrolled in an Amazon FBA course to learn more about how to Private Label and grow a business on Amazon.
(The course is one of the industry standards and is so incredibly boring and tedious!
That’s why years later I created FBA EDU so that you too can create a life like this in a way that isn’t tedious or boring!)
Get the entire FBA 101 course free here.
Want to hear us tell our story?
Watch below.
Prefer to Read?
Here’s how we did it:
The First Steps
The nature of a product business (as opposed to creating digital products or consulting/freelancing) is that there are significant start-up costs. We had to first order products before we could sell them online.
As guided by the course, we talked to a supplier and had our first order of backpacks from China about 5 months after we started. We began by only investing about $1500 dollars into our products (an additional $4000 on the course) and grew from there.
What is Amazon FBA?
The “FBA” stands for “Fulfillment by Amazon”. That means that instead of storing boxes of products in your home or building a warehouse and hiring employees you ship your products directly to an Amazon warehouse and they store and ship the products for you!
(Not to mention there are 120 Million+ Amazon Prime users in USA alone!)
How We Use Amazon FBA
We are a private label company. We created our own brand Tripped Travel Gear. (There are multiple Amazon business models.)
We work with a manufacturer in China (common for many FBA businesses).
They produce our products, then a quality control team inspects products at our manufacturing site before our manufacturer ships directly to Amazon warehouses in the US.
We don’t even see our products most of the time!
Most of our time now is spent marketing, producing new products, and managing inventory.
Our Success
2017 was our first year in business with Amazon FBA. By the fifth month, we had the first products sold…not without a few challenges of course!
We ran out of stock by summer and by the time we were restocked it was almost the end of the year.
Our goal was to make $100 dollars in daily profit.
Not only is this an industry standard of a “successful” product on Amazon, but we had just finished a year long trip around the world and knew we could live comfortably in many places in the world.
We finally had a day in quarter 4 that we made $250 in profit in one day. To us, that meant our company was going to work!
In 2017, we did about $30,000 in sales, but only about $5,000 in profit in the first year. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough hope to keep us working on our business goals.
2018
This is the point when Tim finally left his “new” 9-5 job to work full time on Tripped. I was still working an online consulting job so we did have steady income (also since we just spend all of our money in our year around the world)!
That meant that in less than a year from returning from our 10 months around the world, broke from spending all of our money on travel, we were already up and running enough to call ourselves digital nomads!
BUILDING A BRAND
In 2019 our business grew to another milestone where I could drop all of my clients and concentrate fulltime on this blog, YouTube, and continue marketing for Tripped Travel Gear.
(Update) 2020
As a seven figure business, we are balancing growing pains while continuing to invest most of our profits back into our business.
Tripped bought us a Florida home so we could enjoy the balance of both home and travel.
Less travel at the beginning of the pandemic allowed for me to create FBA EDU so that others can live a life of freedom like us.
(Update) 2021
Tripped Travel Gear, which began as “just a way to travel anytime we want” has only shown us that we haven’t been dreaming big enough.
Not only have we found the perfect balance of having a home and traveling anytime/anywhere we want, we are now looking into investment properties in popular vacation locations.
(Update) 2022
As a multi-seven figure business we now make strategic decisions like
How can we make a positive impact on the world
What, if any, is our exit strategy?
What other high performing people can help us grow?
How, exactly, do we want to spend our time?
Years in Review
Are you only just now hearing about our success story? It wasn’t always like this.
We’re fortunate to have documented our journey the whole way on YouTube.
At the end of the day we were really just two twenty somethings who wanted more than our desk jobs.
Now, we are our own bosses, we can live anywhere in the world, and we feel completely in control of our own destiny! What else could we ask for?!
You can do this too.
For us, all it took was Tim following the steps in an Amazon FBA course to make our dreams a reality.
If you would like more information on starting an Amazon business, we created a FREE TRAINING.
It only takes about 60 minutes to complete and it will give you a better perspective on how much money and time it takes to start an Amazon business.
Click the image below to get started, free!
Video Transcript
Read instead of watch:
Tim: 00:00 We make money to travel by selling private label on Amazon.
Fin: 00:07 If you've been along this series with us, we talked about how we were doing YouTube, we shared the money that we were making there. That's when I started my consulting business that you can see in the second video. In that timeline the Amazon story begins.
Tim: 00:21 Coming back from our trip I knew 100% that I needed to have a location independent business that I wouldn't have to be anywhere in the same time zone or wouldn't have to physically be present. Having an Amazon business was just one among many options I had looked at when I came back and it seems because of my background in procurement and purchasing one that was the best fit and would be easiest for me to get off the ground.
Tim: 00:48 Before we left for the trip, and I think it's important for the transparency here, I was making $75,000 a year in Chicago as a procurement manager at a marketing company where everybody cared that you were there for ten hours a day. I had a stupid commute, even though it was in the city, it took 45 minutes each way to go just not that far.
Fin: 01:07 And another work culture where you're expected to be at happy hour and the longer you stay, the better an employee you are. $75,000 sounds like a large salary for you are in a really expensive city, and then when it comes down to your time for your hours put in, Tim was working events on the weekends and things like that. And that's relevant-
Tim: 01:26 Yeah, I forgot about that.
Fin: 01:27 Because now when we come back and talk about Tim getting just a very entry level kind of cold calling sales position and he's taking home less than $40,000, Tim also walked to work and he was only there for about six or seven hours a day and nobody batted an eye when he walked in at 9:30 in the morning and left at 4:30. What that did is it gave Tim the other eight hours, which is an incredible book if you are, if this is motivating you, to work on his full time business. I don't know how you would have done that with the big Chicago job-
Tim: 02:04 You couldn't.
Fin: 02:05 And then Tim was also being offered other positions when we came back. Companies contacted him, do you want to do this? Well, he was saying no to more money at those other jobs because this was so low pressure and it gave him the time to do Amazon. So I just want to say-
Tim: 02:20 Yeah, it was kind of like double down on myself and not worry about making incremental more, but completely freeing myself. Listen, I know that if you're watching this it's, oh great. You're sitting there and talking... We didn't know it was going to work, but it was just that-
Fin: 02:34 Right. That's a good point.
Tim: 02:37 Hindsight's completely 2020. There comes a time, we've all been there, felt their frustration, knew we can do our own thing. That was my time when I really felt the calling and it was time to take that risk.
Fin: 02:50 And we were just so desperate. This isn't going to speak to everyone if you're just kind of casually watching our channel and you're just kind of curious how we make money type thing, but if you are out there and you are like, I hate my job, I hate my lifestyle of commuting and going in and being on somebody else's time, you get this. Any sacrifice necessary, canceling dinner plans, can't go to the wedding, all of those sacrifices that we have done for so many years-
Tim: 03:17 I love how fired up you are.
Fin: 03:21 Of course everyone's looking at Tim and we're driving a '96 Camry and our friends have these beautiful cars and homes and are starting to have kids and these great jobs, and we're telling people, "No, thanks for setting me up for the interview with your friends friend. We don't want it. We need Tim's time to dedicate to Amazon."
Tim: 03:43 The first two months when we got back I spent learning about the business. I was talking to a supplier by maybe March and then I had my first order, I had spent $500 on backpacks from China about five months after we got home because it took about two months to get them from the supplier.
Fin: 04:05 That's really fast.
Tim: 04:06 It was fast. If $500 is a, that's a small, small order, but it was something to get started. One of the things I got into this whole mindset with was I was just going to keep taking steps forward until I failed or succeeded, which I know might sound kind of cheesy-
Fin: 04:24 No, it sounds so sweet.
Tim: 04:25 But it was just I wanted to, either this is going to work or it's not going to work, and if it's not going to work, I'm going to find the next thing.
Fin: 04:31 Right. Maybe the product doesn't work and then you're testing different products and-
Tim: 04:35 And guess what? That first product didn't work. But it was a great learning opportunity. It got me in the game. It got me into my second product. Which also didn't work. But we weren't losing money.
Fin: 04:46 What was it?
Tim: 04:47 So after the backpack we tried a packing organizer thing that didn't work either, but that led us to the packing cubes that we do now. It's all just about baby steps to finding the right thing.
Fin: 05:01 How does that all work for somebody who doesn't really know what this whole Amazon world is and what an Amazon FBA is?
Tim: 05:08 Sure, sure. So again, we private label, so that means that we have our own brand. I have manufacturers overseas that are making our products. They are shipping to us. When we first started, and we've got some B-roll of this, I was literally getting the packages at the house, doing the inspection myself. We were hand stuffing our business cards into it and then sending that on to Amazon .
Fin: 05:31 Because it's a quality check. You don't know what's coming from overseas if you're just going to send it off to Amazon for them to put it in the warehouse to then ship out when somebody buys it. We're like, oh, maybe we should send it to our house at the time and go in and look and be like, this is what we ordered.
Tim: 05:49 Right, because it was new suppliers. Yeah.
Fin: 05:50 Right. I'm just saying you wouldn't necessarily think about that.
Tim: 05:55 But now we have really trusted suppliers. People who understand our business, understand our quality level. When you've been working with somebody for a while, and I know this is with a lot of private labelers on Amazon, they're shipping directly from the factory to Amazon and when Amazon gets an order, Amazon has their own warehouse, we've all seen the crazy warehouses on TV. People working, they actually go pick your product and ship it out. So people who imagined that we were driving around in the RV with a trailer full of backpacks and packing cubes behind us, we don't ship things out ourselves. Those are all in a warehouse. We just manage the innovation part of it, the marketing, obviously we're the ones buying the stock, adding new products, that sort of thing.
Fin: 06:38 Managing the inventory. All the-
Tim: 06:41 Yeah. All the risk is still us. It is our business. The difference is we don't have to run a warehouse then ship it out-
Fin: 06:47 Right, then Amazon takes returns if anybody has a problem with our products, then they send it back to Amazon, who processes it and then our business refunds the money there. So what that business model is called is called Fulfilled By Amazon. That's the Amazon FBA business.
Tim: 07:07 2017 was our first full year in business. By the fifth month was when I had my first product being sold. Just to be transparent on money here, we had almost no sales until July, September. I ran out of stock in August. By the time I got restocked, we were full into quarter four and I had given myself a very low bar. The day I make $100 in profit is the day I celebrate. Because that meant we could kind of live in Bali at $100 a day in profit. I know that's silly, but it was a low bar. We had a day in Q4 in 2017 where we made over $250 a day in profit, and that's when it hit me. This was going to work.
Tim: 07:49 For 2017 we did $30,000 in sales, but only about $5,000 in profit.
Fin: 07:58 In the first year.
Tim: 07:59 In the first year. So 2018 and beyond, only once I proved in Q4 of 2017 that the business was something I could scale was when I left my job. And luckily this is when Fin was doing her consulting business, supported me 100% on, yes, you need to spend more time on learning this business. Let's double down on the, we have proof of concept. Now it's time to scale.
Fin: 08:24 Because that meant that between all of our revenue sources, we had enough to get on the road. So that's a great starting place for you too, is all these revenue streams. This right now is almost a compilation of all of the videos in the series. We had the YouTube income, we had my consulting, and then we had this $100 a day from Amazon and then whatever piece of that puzzle is working the best, then you can just dedicate your time into-
Tim: 08:52 To growing that, yeah.
Fin: 08:52 And just for us, that was Amazon. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but does that take us into now?
Tim: 08:58 Well Fin, that does take us into right now. Amazon's turned into an animal unto itself, I guess. I don't want to say that... So Tripped travel gear on Amazon was this cute little idea at first and now it's starting to grow into pretty formidable battle.
Fin: 09:16 The fact that now Amazon supports all three of us. Are you sleeping?
Tim: 09:26 I feel like Pepper doesn't really contribute to the... She's happy now.
Fin: 09:31 See, Amazon now supports all of her gravy and kibbles. Well, this got silly all of a sudden. We're uncomfortable talking now about the success of the business because I don't think really we can even believe that we're here where we are and this is just so much... This is the result of so much hard work. We are entrepreneurs. We're here in a beautiful high rise building in Guadalajara with our cute little dog. We're living a normal lifestyle, being able to travel. It's just so many great resources and-
Tim: 10:08 There;s so many terrible resources out there too. There's a great guy, his name is Scott Volkner, he's got an Amazon podcast. We will throw that link below-
Fin: 10:18 Because we have an episode on it talking about our business. Keith and Alyssa, if your RVers, I'm sure you know them, they interviewed us on their RV Entrepreneur podcast regarding the Amazon FBA business as well.
Fin: 10:31 If this just sounds so intimidating because, to be honest, I am not a product person. This would not be up my alley at all if I was watching this. Tim touches the fabric and he looks at the zippers and he's like, oh... He's like, "Look at this," and I'm like, "Oh, colors." That's just not my thing. But the point of why this business is so successful for this lifestyle is it's not contingent on a specific time zone or it has no time related to it. It doesn't demand time for money. It's completely scalable and you don't need a lot of resources to do it. We don't need a lot of other employees working for us that now we're managing. We don't need space because Amazon controls all of that. But if the products are scaring you, you can also create a business similar to this with information.
Fin: 11:26 We're going to break this video down into three sections for you guys. We're going to talk about what is a digital product, how to start, and how to market it and actually make some sales. So please, Louise, teach us what is a digital product and the different types.
Louise: 11:41 Sure.