Selling on Amazon for Passive Income

On Thursday morning I started the drive down to Virginia, staying just outside of Washington D.C. for a wedding.  I love hiking and backpacking and found a park right by our hotel called Prince William Park which is a national forest.  I got out there at 5PM and was greeted by this awesome view as we entered the trailhead for an evening hike.

I went on a 10 mile hike through the forest in 90 degree weather and was drenched in sweat.  After returning to civilization I went to dinner with my wife and turned in for a great night of sleep.

When I woke up the next morning I got my daily sales update from Fetcher (great tool for Amazon sellers) and saw that I had made just over $90 in profit from my previous day’s sales.  Here’s what the update looked like:

Divorcing Time from Money

The best thing you can do to reach financial freedom faster is to start earning extra money.  The problem with so many websites out there touting side hustle income is that they rely on trading your time for money.

The last thing I want to do after coming home from my day job is go putz around in my car for 4 hours so I can make $10 per hour driving for Uber.  No thanks.

Selling physical products on Amazon is amazing because they take care of all the fulfillment for you and you can be completely hands off once you put in the initial work.  You’ll hear a lot of gurus praising passive income and singing about how awesome it is but there’s no such thing as completely passive income.  At some point, it does require work and hustle.  The great thing about physical products is that you can put that work in up front to build a brand and create your product, then once you’ve got 2,000 units sitting in an Amazon warehouse, you don’t have to put in any more work.  Selling 1 unit per day is the same as selling 100 units per day.  With the Amazon worker bees doing all of your fulfillment work you are free to follow your passions and spend your time doing whatever you want.  

The separation of trading time for money is one of the most valuable things you can learn.  I’m currently reading through a book called UNSCRIPTED (yah, all caps) by MJ DeMarco who also wrote the Millionaire Fastlane.  This book is only half as gimmicky as the Millionaire Fastlane but it has a lot of great information and really drives home the point of how building a business that’s divorced from your time is the quickest and easiest way to build massive wealth.  I’ll post a review soon once I get through the book but so far I’ve been really impressed, especially since it only cost $5.

If you’ve got any questions about starting an Amazon physical product business or want help, just leave a comment below or send me an email at jim@acceleratedfi.com.  There’s no catch and no sales pitch.  I just want to help people learn the ropes and hopefully clear up some of the mystery around starting your own business.