how to find a winning product to sell online: twenty five thousand products before the first one

a couple of weeks ago i taped with an e-commerce founder in miami who walked away from a corporate career in cloud computing. burnout. he wanted out.

his goal wasn't a unicorn. it was ten thousand dollars a month. enough to live modestly and own his time. he wrote that number down.

"i think that was the, that was a magical number. so i had that goal written down."

then he spent about a year burning through his savings trying to hit it.

the breakthrough wasn't a hack. it was reps. he used a browser tool to research products, and he looked at a lot of them.

"with that extension, i analyze approximately twenty five thousand products. so the process was quite, you know, like cumbersome. there was not much ai back then."

twenty five thousand.

and then one hit. his first winner made ten thousand dollars in profit in its first month. the magic number, the one he'd written down, in a single product.

everyone searching how to find a winning product to sell online wants the shortcut. the list of trending items. the secret niche. the tool that tells you what to sell.

he had a tool. it didn't tell him what to sell. it let him look at twenty five thousand things fast enough that the pattern showed up.

the pattern he found is boring on purpose. simple products. small problems. three to ten dollars of margin per unit. make it up on volume. nothing anyone would put on a magazine cover.

that's the part that fascinates me. we celebrate the big idea. he built his living off small ones he found by grinding.

now he teaches it. four free live classes a week. a community of more than fifty thousand people across meetups, webinars and youtube. he gives the method away and sells deeper help to the people who want it. intellectual capital first, the offer second.

then we got to ai, and this is where it gets interesting for everyone, not only e-commerce.

he said a product video used to cost six to seven thousand dollars a clip. now it's about twenty dollars a month in tools. a store that used to cost five to ten thousand to build can go up in a week.

so the cost of the build collapsed.

you'd think that makes it easier. it does, for everyone. which means more competition. more stores, more videos, more people selling the same boring product you found.

the cost of building went to zero. the cost of judgment didn't move.

the edge now is the human in the loop. the person who did the reps and knows a good product when they see one. ai can show you twenty five thousand products in an afternoon. it can't give you the eye he built by looking at them himself.

i see the same thing in fundraising and in sales. ai lets you send more, build more, test more. good. but the founders who win are still the ones who sat with the data long enough to see what everyone else scrolled past.

so if you're hunting for your first winner, don't ask ai what to sell. ask it to help you look at more things, faster, and then do the judging yourself. keep a written goal like he did. keep the margins small and the problems simple. and expect the first few hundred to teach you more than they earn.

long term, i think this is the trade. ai makes trying cheap. it makes knowing expensive. and knowing only comes from reps.

his story is the kind of thing i love putting on the show... a real number, a real grind, a real result. if you have one of those, come on the show.

so how many reps have you done on your idea... twenty five, or twenty five thousand?