This simple software has earned him $400,000+ 😎

A product to take the frustration out of printing labels on thermal printers, primarily targeted at Amazon Sellers.

I was an Amazon seller myself and was spending up to an hour every day just getting labels to print properly. Super inefficient. Every Amazon FBA seller has to label each product and then label each box that gets shipped to Amazon.

I had to choose between a long manual process that took 20-30 minutes per shipment, or some ancient software that was expensive, slow, didn't work half the time

Took a couple of months building out an automated solution, I realized that there were likely other sellers experiencing the same issue. So I put up a basic landing page… it wasn't a wild success. I think I got 20 sign-ups in a month… but I figured I should just release it.

After I put out the first version of AZLabels I emailed a couple of people to ask them to start using it, just to work out all the bugs… I think it's important to release an MVP quickly, but it's also important to make sure your product is worth paying for.

After that, I launched to the 20 people on my sign-up list and asked them to pay $5 a month to print as many labels as they wanted. Half of them signed up which I took to be a good sign, and it was nice to see $50 per month in the Stripe account.

I reached out to influencers in the Amazon Seller space and asked if they would be interested in an affiliate program. This has been the most consistently successful channel for me. I would say a third of our sales are driven this way.

A post on Reddit was pretty successful and brought in 10-20 new customers. It's important on Reddit to stick around and engage with anyone who comments because it will increase the activity and therefore the longevity of your post. Even if they are critical, it's actually helping your post stay at the top and be interesting for people. I've had other successes on Reddit since then by sharing new blog posts.

My first tip is that you have to be doing something — anything at all — if you want to find opportunities… The key is to put in the hard work of lots of small successes that add up to one big success.

​​Other "micro acquisition" platforms are charging ridiculously high fees for buyers and sellers, high % of commission, and locking you in and forcing you to use their platform or partners to complete the sale.

I saw a need to offer a low cost platform that strips everything down back to the basics and does one thing very well - connecting buyers and sellers.

That's why I built Buy // Sell Startups

He's making more with his podcast than in his day job, despite having relatively smaller numbers.

I knew what I'm jumping into, you know, I understood that the niche I am in is small… And I thought we need something else in the communication between the scientists and the benefactor of the science. And the podcast appeared to be a brilliant route to find them.

So I didn't really care how many people by the number will listen because I knew that there's a good chance whoever listens, I can really make a big change for the everyday work of that single person in every single episode.

I didn't want the hassle of selling episode by episode. So when I reached out to a sponsor, I reached out for a long term partnership... very, very openly…

Podcasting is a hard job and it takes time and it takes resources. So for something like 80 episodes, I was doing all that on my own without any financial support. And then eventually I found somebody that shares the view of the world that I have, an engineering company from the UK.

It's not about the interview. It's about an honest conversation... listening, asking meaningful questions, following up, really digging into it with a real curiosity... I set them up. For communicating not only with knowledge but also emotion.

Dimension 1: Focus on one field (specialization)
Dimension 2: Learn across disciplines, apply to a specialty (polymath)
Dimension 3: Think vertically from hacks to principles (mental models)
Dimension 4: Think hundreds of years into the past and future (time)

Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, ‘Good job, great quarter.’ And I’ll say, ‘Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago.’ I’m working on a quarter that’ll happen in 2021 right now… 

I get to work two or three years into the future, and most of my leadership team has the same setup.