<div class="bbWrapper"><h4 class="bbHeading"><a class="u-anchorTarget" name="-2023-recap"></a>2023 Recap​<a class="hoverLink" href="#-2023-recap" title="Permanent link"></a></h4><a href="https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/attachments/1704027689524-webp.53259/"
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I ended the year with record weekly orders and profit.<br />
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I started the year with no personally owned business and high hopes for my full time job. I have a senior position in a medium sized company and I have an incentive scheme which is something like stock options. The company’s January results were great but after that the company performed poorly.<br />
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Over the course of the year it became clear that my three year incentive plan that I worked so hard for would be worth absolutely nothing. What’s more is that the company was not pursuing a strategy in line with my incentive structure, so I was stuck with just my salary and potentially an outsized share of the blame if the shareholders ever decided that enough was enough.<br />
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Since my anticipated windfall was out the window I looked for a way to supplement my income. I had an idea about automated product scraping plus dropshipping. My first attempt was a Shopify store selling beauty products. I had it up and running for a few months with zero sales and a few hundred dollars in ad spend. This was all before I started posting here.<br />
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Later I heard about this Amazon business model from a friend, and the very same day I dropped the Shopify store and started building the Amazon bot. Even though there were already established competitors in the field, I thought that I could carve out some of the market for myself through superior software and processes.<br />
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The bulk of the development work happened during six weeks over the summer when by chance I was living alone rather than with my family. Especially with development projects, extended periods of focus are great for productivity and I made the most of mine.<br />
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This business draws on several skills I have gained during my slowlane career: software development, logistics, and vendor/partner relationship management. These saved me some time on the learning curve, but I think that anybody could accomplish the same as me, regardless of past experience.<br />
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There were also many new things to learn, especially the peculiarities of working with Amazon, which is something like driving a clown car through a minefield with a blindfold on and a demon on your shoulder that only whispers lies. That’s not a complaint at all — it’s a level playing field since all my competitors have to deal with the same environment. But the environment itself is ridiculous in many ways.<br />
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The business is scalable to maybe an additional 5x in its current Amazon-only form, but this form violates the C in CENTS. One change of policy from Amazon could completely eliminate my business. One mistake in my product filters could trigger some automatic block of my account. One lost consol from my vendor could get me de-listed for not fulfilling on time.<br />
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So I’m often thinking about how to allocate my limited time to invest: either grow the existing revenue stream, which is easier but doesn’t mitigate my risk, or grow a new revenue stream which is much harder but does mitigate my risk.<br />
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But binary choices like these are often just delusions we create to discourage ourselves from taking action. There are infinite possibilities in the world, infinite ways to make money, and infinite ways to look at the same situation. I need to accomplish both goals: to grow the business and to mitigate the risks. There is a way, and I can find it if I make the effort.<br />
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My main perceived challenge is finding the time to devote to improving my systems considering I also have a full time job and a family, much like the main characters in the Great Rat Race Escape. I’ve already made adjustments in both of those spheres to try to free up time, but it is never enough and I never run out of things to work on. Again I am probably delusional and need to take an objective look at things to achieve what I want.<br />
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I want to move at 10x speed and I have full confidence that with that speed I can make 10x profit and even structure the company for a sale. This is all possible in the span of one year, in 2024. If it doesn’t happen then it is only because I chose the slowlane out of fear. And if it does happen then it is because I manifested it through directed effort.<br />
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Happy New Year.</div>
