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In this 2nd year anniversary of the eclipse, Brock Johnson, shares with us how he started his journey in Amazon. One of the youngest successful Amazon entrepreneurs Brock has faced health issues at a young age but this did not stop him from 0 to $6 million in 6 months.
A bit of a background
- Brock has an original approach to selling on Amazon.
- His entrepreneurial background comes from his father who was the treasurer in a hospital and in a university.
- He started selling video games on E-Bay.
- He collected used computers or old computers and scrapped them for gold and silver components.
- He is now 27 years old.
- He sold his Warcraft virtual stuff in an auction house and applied the same principles to actual auctions in E-Bay.
- He also experienced getting banned on E-Bay.
Learning Moments
- He questioned rules and schedules – why do you have to follow them? Because other people said so, was never a good answer for him.
- He was not a popular kid.
First Business
- His first business was penny buying business.
- He bought and sold rare pennies. He used to ship about 70 pounds of pennies in flat rate boxes.
- He also tried importing counterfeit. And learned his lesson on value versus quality.
- He also did flipping products on the side.
- He always took an asymmetric approach to life and reward.
- His other ventures were copper scrapping business and homecoming t-shirt– this is where he got started with seasonality in business.
- In 2012, he started advertising in Facebook.
- He also experienced copyright infringement claims brought against him in his last year of business. Lesson: Don’t do unsolicited business.
- Not because you are legal doesn’t mean other people can’t file a suit against you.
Discovering Amazon
- He discovered Amazon by accident.
- He got a breakthrough with surplus stuff and sold them on E-Bay but he made more money on Amazon
- Danny’s story: he discovered Amazon by accident too. He realized that he can not go on with the business on E-Bay where shipping is a challenge. He finally discovered Amazon FBA.
- Brock learned about retail arbitrage and made money on Black Friday.
- He wrote down a list of his ideals and targets.
- He went to different Radio Shacks and did wholesale through them
- Brock realized that he needed something that will scale.
The Eclipse Glasses
- He works along the line of buying stuff that has future value. Like old Nintendo games etc. and sell them at higher prices.
- If he can not sell it, he will generally use the products on another business venture.
- Brock’s projects are on products that can make him proud.
- He started with hippie goggles, LED backpacks etc. His market was people on music festivals. These projects leading to the Eclipse Glasses.
- His next project was fairy lights but pulled out the last minute because of quality issues – he did not want to endanger anyone with bad products.
- The idea: he was planning to source LED furniture. His passion was always lights. His target was to create smart lights.
- He then created software based on moods. But had to shutdown his company because he would have had to take venture capital funds.
- Brock decided against taking funds – so he decided to work on private label.
- One email caught his attention: solar eclipse glasses.
- Thought process: Always look at fundamentals on something. Look at what is the news, what is coming up.
- Always look at the numbers: cash flows, updating and trends, past predictions and so on.
- Brock got 300% ROI – almost all his products were available in US.
- He had great relationships with his suppliers which is why he was able to get great lead time.
Certification is EVERYTHING
- It will take only one pair of burned eyes to lose everything – get certified or you lose everything.
- ISO requirement was really easy. So make sure you get proper certification.
