What does Tom Wang suggest you do if you’re not quite ready to start your own Amazon FBA business? “I truly believe the best job that you can get that is closest to being a business owner, without having to take the risks, without having to invest a lot of money, is actually becoming a salesperson,” he says. “Me personally, I was working at Yellow Pages in the call center. Every single day, I’d dial eighty to a hundred calls a day. And I’d get seventy, eighty, ninety noes.”
“I’d get tons of rejection,” he continues. “But that’s why my skin is much thicker than everybody else’s, because I’ve already faced objections. And what I came to understand is every single no gets you closer to a yes. And that’s the exact same thing that happens in the business world. You’re gonna have failures, you’re gonna have rejections, but then your skin grows thicker and thicker. And every single no will get you closer to that yes. So if you wanna become an entrepreneur? Find a sales job first.”
Okay, cool, so say you are ready to launch an Amazon FBA business. How much is it gonna cost? “That’s probably the number one question I get asked all the time,” Tom says. “But how it works, it’s not like a binary number. Let me ask you this: How much does it cost to get into the stock market? How much does it cost to buy real estate? It really depends on the stock, and it really depends on the piece of real estate. Same as Amazon FBA. It really depends on the product that you’re trying to sell.”
“You can find products where the barrier to entry is very low, and you can invest a couple thousand dollars, or you can actually get into a product whether the barrier to entry is really high, and you can spend ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars. Even a hundred thousand dollars. So the question is not how much money does it cost to start an Amazon business, it’s how much money do you have? And then you find a product that fits within that criteria.”
What skills will you need to start an Amazon FBA business? First, Tom says, you gotta be a little bit data-driven, a little analytical. Reason being, when you’re browsing through products, trying to find which one you should launch with, you’ll need to use software like Viral Launch or Helium 10, and look at the metrics and be able to make a smart business decision on which one you should go with. Or else, you’ll end up picking the wrong product and waste a ton of time and money.
Second, you need to be a strong communicator and negotiator. This’ll serve you well when you’re talking to suppliers, ensuring you get the best product at the best price. Last but not least, number three, is you need to have some marketing chops, some creativity. This way, when you list your product on Amazon, and start running PPC ads, you can stand out from the competition and win the “buy box.” Develop these three skills and you should do just fine, Tom says.
How do you become a millionaire with Amazon FBA? Step one, you gotta believe it’s possible, Tom explains. Step two, you gotta roll up your sleeves and do the work. When Tom got started on Amazon, he was still working full-time at Yellow Pages. After each shift, he’d come home and work as much as he could on his FBA biz. After a year or two, it had grown from a side hustle to his main thing. He quit his day job, went all-in, and became a multimillionaire not long after.
