142: Building an Amazon FBA Business to Help Amazon Sellers (a 🚫 Bullshit Amazon Biz)

Background on Fernando Cruz of Commerce Labs:

Fernando Campos is the co-founder of MarketplaceOps, and oversees operations, product development, and finance. Prior to founding MarketplaceOps, Fernando came from tech, where as Head of Sales, he helped his company secure over $30M in venture funding and scale to over 80 employees. In 2014, Fernando jumped ship and cofounded MarketplaceOps with his best friend Nick from the University of Southern California. Together they’ve grown the business to gross 8 figures annually in just under 4 years.

Fernando is also partner at Seller Tradecraft, where he’s helped thousands of others get started on their Amazon journey. In his spare time, Fernando passionately loves devouring delicious ice cream treats, traveling, and training for triathlons.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[1:02] Fernando introduces himself as the founder of Marketplace Ops, which produces design products to be sold on Amazon. These products vary from home and kitchen to sports and outdoors.
[4:01] Fernando provides a good example of an early product they successfully ranked up in Amazon.
[7:45] After their success on the food containers and other products, they tried selling lockpick sets, which was a big failure for the company.
[11:29] After graduating from college, Fernando wanted to be an investment banker. He found a job in the financial sector but quickly found out that the corporate world wasn’t for him.
[15:20] From a well-paying financial job, he decided to get a sales position in Better Works. This was his plan to get a lot of experience and eventually become an entrepreneur.
[17:20] With only a year of sales experience, Fernando became the Director of Sales of a new company that just came out of Y-Combinator.
[19:52] Fernando and his friend Nick decided to quit their jobs and start their own company.
[21:52] Being confident and experienced was a huge factor in going all in with starting the business.
[26:00] He tells the story of how they finally decided to sell their products on Amazon.
[28:15] Fernando explains the advantages of selling in Amazon.
[31:19] During the early days of doing business using Amazon, they hired a coach who helped propel them forward.
[40:28] The first year of the business, they hit $2.3 million in revenue.
[41:32] There were several learning lessons they experienced as their company grew and evolve.
[44:38] Their company draws a lot of inspiration on Netflix. They see their brand as a professional sports team instead of one big family.
[48:20] Seeing his employees and the people around him become financially stable because of the company is very rewarding and motivating for Fernando.
[51:44] They made a bunch of mistakes that led to letting go of half of their staff. Fernando considers this the darkest days of his business.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert T. Kiyosaki, Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? I'm really loving the Apple Airpods lately, my girlfriend got them though 🙂
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? There's a million – Slack, Loom, Zoom, Pixelfy, SellerLegend, Seller.Tools
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? We're always looking to bring on more debt to the business, in the middle of a raise right now.

Key Point from the Interview:

“One of the big learning lessons is figuring out what your unfair advantage is and then really focusing on that.”

Resources Mentioned:

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