That’s when I dove into private label and custom products. My initial product that I invented was the first leather watch strap without holes. It worked like a zip-tie and protected the leather from traditional holes.

That product did over six figures in sales. It was the most amazing experience too. In the ecommerce world today, so many people are hyped on dropshipping. I’ll tell you, dropshipping is a cool way to get started in ecommerce but it isn’t sustainable.

You churn and burn your customers. All the $10m+ ecommerce companies I know have their own brands because at the end of the day, customer retention stems from brand equity. You will rarely get repeat business running a dropshipping business because the customer experience sucks.

Now you’re probably wondering how the heck can I create my own product. The product idea is on you. What I can help with is getting you connected to the right factory. In my ten years in and out of China, this is what I’ve specialized in. I’ve helped companies doing over $300m in revenue produce tables to startup ecom brands producing athletic apparel.

The key to it all stems from having the right factory connections. With this knowledge, I had to have our team at Sourcify create something more scalable. We hit the drawing board and came up with this EPIC tool that we call Factory Confirm.

It’s a magnificent piece of software put together by our data scientists that enables you to analyze factories on Alibaba. Take out the guesswork of finding a factory. Instead, you can now use this tool to see which factories are legit in real time.

Look, I’m not a salesman and in fact, I don’t like most ecommerce coaches out there. What I love though, is helping people.

I’ve been in your shoes before. When I first went out and started a ecom brand almost ten years ago I didn’t know jack. I was googling everything I could and at the time there weren’t any great tools out there like Shopify or Sourcify.

Now with software, being and growing as a ecommerce entrepreneur has become so much easier. Don’t take my word for it, try it out yourself 🙂

I am the CEO of Sourcify, the fastest growing sourcing platform backed by YCombinator that helps hundreds of companies manufacture products around the world.

In the past seven years I’ve brought dozens of products to market, ran a few ecommerce companies (sold one), been a part of projects on Kickstarter raising a total of over $1mil, and been featured in media outlets like the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and more. I also used to live in China and speak Mandarin near fluently.