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4 Things To Learn From This Entrepreneur On Building E-Commerce Business Seth Kniep and his Just One Dime team manage over $100 million in annual revenue

By Arnab Das

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Seth Kniep

As is the case with most entrepreneurs, Seth Kniep had a humble beginning. He was in a job with he did not like and dreamt of his own enterprise, but to no avail. And his personal debt was on the rise.

But then, resilience and persistence paid off.

Today, Kniep and his Just One Dime team manage over $100 million in annual revenue, building Amazon stores for people with capital but not enough time to learn how to build an Amazon business.

The co-founder of Just One Dime, Kniep has trained over 10,000 entrepreneurs in over 150 countries, 27 of whom are multi-millionaires today. Seth's team grows the Amazon store for one of the sharks from the Shark Tank TV show, runs a sourcing team in China and multiple fulfillment centers across the US, and was requested by two countries to train their top businesses.

Headquartered in Austin, TX, Kniep is raising an army of investors and entrepreneurs who leverage innovation, capital, and vision to help the human race for future generations.

Here are five takeaways, we can learn from Kniep's story back when he was just getting started:

Solve a problem

Back when he started, Kniep chained himself to his office chair and called 70 suppliers every single day asking a simple question: "What is the best-selling product online today?" Seth later realizes that the concept was great but he was asking the wrong person. Who cares what the suppliers think? They are not the ones paying you for your product. You must find out what your "customer' wants. In its simplest form, building a successful business means solving a problem for people and charging for it. Find a problem and you can find a product.

Write a story

Your customers are not really buying your product. Not even its features. They are buying what your product can do for them. It's the experience they are looking for. So don't sell the product, sell the experience. Don't sell a vacuum cleaner, sell the cleanest floor this side of the Mississippi. Don't sell the pirate costume. Sell the life of a pirate sailing the seven seas. Don't sell the living room lamp. Sell the breath-taking lighting it brings to an evening snack.

Find a niche within a niche

The suppliers Seth called kept saying "vapes" so Seth launched an e-commerce vape store. But the market was flooded. Had Seth gone for a subcategory of vapes, he might have sold his vape business for more than $35 on eBay (he boasts about his first "exit"). Seth found his first high-selling product when he entered the market of funeral fashion (yes, there is such a thing). But by this time he understood that you cannot just go for an entire product category. You need to niche down. You need to fit into a specific niche and execute better than anyone. That's when he found necklace cremation urns, a subcategory of a funeral fashion. This launched his Amazon store into a momentum that blew passed his first $1 million in less than 12 months. Seth shares that any time a market is flooded, go for a subcategory of that market until the competition is low. But don't narrow down so far that you lose demand.

If you are afraid, then do it afraid

In the early days, when Seth and his wife KK needed capital, they walked through their house, grabbed everything they did not absolutely need, and sold it on Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook marketplaces. The house turned into a ghost town. But Seth knew that this cash would help scale his business that would allow him to buy 100 times the household items some day. When Seth couldn't get a product to sell on eBay, he put them in a basket, and walked door to door, selling them to his neighbors. "I treasure those early days," Seth reminisces. "They did something to me on the inside. They built grit, endurance, and faith. I had to put on the mindset that I would do whatever it takes to create freedom for me and my family."

Never give up

Building a business is hard. Creating financial freedom is no skip through the park. But as Seth shares, if you are willing to fail forward, make mistakes, and grow along the way, this may be the best adventure of your life yet.

Arnab Das

Search Analyst and Cofounder - Classywriteups.com

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