Sam Wolf: I started working three months after I graduated and launched it the in following June. I hired a couple of developers. We worked on putting it together. We launched with 7,000 items mainly vitamins and supplements that I knew were selling well and were good items from my experience in the health food business.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. All kinds of niche e-commerce businesses have been built over the last 20 years. Sam and his family have built a health and wellness products business that is doing quite well. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?
Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale did each of these businesses reach? Are we talking million of dollars in revenue? Angie Stocklin: To be honest, it was hundreds of thousands. A couple of the brands were in the tens of thousands. Anything that was over a million, we kept. Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit
Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about other businesses. How much did you buy the reading glasses for? How did that ramp? Angie Stocklin: We ended up just buying a domain. It was not a great domain. It was readingglassesshopper.com. It’s a mouthful. I think we purchased it for $2,500. We were able to leverage a
Sramana Mitra: Sunglasses is a fairly big category on the Internet. How did you compete with the existing larger players? Angie Stocklin: We were a discount brand. There were several brands that were similar to ours at that time. We were targeting customers who wanted something that was not branded and between $15 and $20.
Sramana Mitra: Somebody else is sending these letters from Indiana and you were an affiliate partner of that particular business. Angie Stocklin: Correct. Sramana Mitra: You were generating traffic in your website and monetizing those letters in that affiliate model from that original business? Angie Stocklin: Yes. Sramana Mitra: How much did he charge for
Sramana Mitra: This is actually an interesting point because we often see entrepreneurs trying to start affiliate marketing as a side business. Did you both quit your jobs and start it full-time or did you still hold on to your prior jobs? Angie Stocklin: We kept our jobs for several years. We were toying around
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Angie and her husband have built a portfolio of e-commerce businesses using a very unusual strategy. I had a lot of fun learning about their journey, and hope you would as well. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are