Amazon killed my startup entrepreneur how earn by blogging blog

Background

This past July, I posted about 3 unique things I did to “Surprise and Delight” my way to 15,000 customers.

Since then, I’ve been obsessively building a new business—a Chrome extension for Amazon sellers. This Chrome extension allowed Amazon sellers to directly contact any customer who left a review (previously not possible).

I also recently moved to Los Angeles on a $15K personal salary and need to make more money within 1-2 months to maintain my current lifestyle.

Initial traction

Only 3 weeks after launching, I was seeing 1-3 new signups per day (at a price of $34) with very little marketing! This, combined with positive feedback from customers, was sooo exciting.

...and then Amazon killed my startup

In an unexpected twist, last Friday night Amazon changed a key part of their HTML (which my Chrome extension relied on) and it stopped working entirely.

Reaction and takeaway

While this could have been gut-wrenching, I’m proud of how I reacted. Almost instantly, I knew I couldn’t afford to let it negatively affect my energy since I still need to make more money to afford LA.

My favorite podcast is “You Made it Weird” with Pete Holmes and I remember him saying something like this a while back:

Think of your life as a TV show. The hard times are just good episodes.

Since hearing that perspective, I’ve always tried to remember it when facing tough times. And hey—I’d totally watch the episode where I move to LA on a $15K salary and get my startup shut down my Amazon!

Next steps

I’ve since adapted the Chrome extension to work about 25% of the time (when an Amazon reviewer uses their real name).

I can’t justify charging money for this, so I decided to release this update for free. It could still be a good way to collect emails for my next Chrome extension, which I’ve already started building.

Anyway, I surprised myself a bit with how motivated I’ve been over the past few days, and I thought sharing this perspective might be useful for anyone else going through stressful times in their own business.

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