How to Make Money on eBay – Lessons Learned from Building Multi-Million Dollar eBay business

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The Importance of Execution

Definition: The capacity to complete assigned tasks and responsibilities to specified standards within a certain timeframe.
In other words: it’s the discipline of getting shit, sorry…..things, DONE.

Running your own business is mostly about execution, your ability to complete tasks in a specific timeframe.
The higher the level of your execution and the faster you can make it happen, the more success you are likely to achieve.
If you’re a one-man-show, then execution is everything. No one will do anything for you, it’s all on YOU.

• You decided to have a couple more hours of sleep instead of going to the post and shipping the items you sold on eBay (and as a result, they will arrive a day later to your customers) – it’s on you.
• You decided to list those super hot selling items next week instead of now (and next week, 30 more sellers join the party and the margins drop by 80%, while the early movers grossed most of the revenue) – it’s on you.
• You let potential customers wait 5, 24, 48 hours until they get a reply to their query (by that time, they’ve already bought from the seller who answered in 5 minutes) – it’s on you.

Steve Jobs about the importance of execution

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The Importance of Perseverance

Definition: steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., especially in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement..
In other words: The art of NOT GIVING UP.

In the past 9 years, we have had multiple “opportunities” to quit, give up, find a day job….things went south so many times I can barely remember all the meltdowns we went through.
What we did instead was to find a way to survive:

1. Thorough investigation of the situation to find the main problem
2. Devised a course of action to solve the main problem
3. Came up with at least one way to improve on previous situation
4. Executed the selected course of action in a timely manner (yes that means setting strict deadlines!)

That’s exactly what we did when $20K worth of goods went missing and customers were raining fury on us.

Ben Horowitz is one of the most prominent entrepreneurs and investors in history. He sold his company to HP for $1.6 Billion but the road to that exit was hard, very hard. Ben’s book from 2014, “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, was his attempt to be honest about how difficult it is build and run a startup. This gives you some context to the quote below.

Ben telling about the difficulties of running a startup

The Importance of “Killing your Business”…every day

In other words, we never took our business for granted, we always challenged ourselves to think:

• What if our sales suddenly drop tomorrow?
• What if a new seller offers a better value proposition?
• Is our value proposition good enough?
• What if a new model comes out tomorrow? Can we get it? From who? How fast?
• What if our supplier goes out of business?
• What if our supplier decides to raise prices?
• What if our main delivery courier raises prices by 10%?
• What is the next product to kill our product? How will we react? Do we have a plan?

In CrazyLister, we keep going through this practice and follow our competition really closely to make sure that CrazyLister’s solution is ALWAYS the most advanced and gives the most value to the users. It’s not one step ahead of the competition, but hopefully 4-5 steps, so that even if someone tries to catch-up, we will have enough time to build this gap again and stay way ahead.
In order to really understand your business, you have to dig in deep and know how you can change it in multiple directions.

John F. Kennedy about changing things