Right.
Pour yourself a coffee. Or a beer. Whichever fits the day you're having.
Because last Thursday's live went somewhere I didn't think we'd go — and the chat absolutely cracked open the side of Amazon FBA that nobody on the highlight reel wants to admit exists.
We talked about the £37,000 profit month. We talked about the £30,000 credit limit cut that wiped me out overnight. We talked about why I'm potentially leaving the UK. We talked about the loneliness that nobody warns you about.
And we talked about how to start with £100 in a charity shop.
If you missed the live, this is the digest. Buckle in.
Key Takeaways
The hidden downside of full-time Amazon FBA is the silence. I sit at this desk all day. Alone. If I don't deliberately message people, jump on calls, and force myself to talk to other humans in the industry, I genuinely won't speak for most of a working day. The laptop lifestyle has a sound — and that sound is silence. You have to build the network as deliberately as you build the business, or it'll eat you. This was, hands down, the most important question I got asked this week.
External shocks are real and you have to plan for them. American Express cut my credit limit in half overnight. £65–70k of working capital, gone in an instant. I had to reset the entire business to zero — stop ordering for two months, sell through everything, pay off all the credit, and rebuild from one unit in Amazon. After three years full-time. The lesson isn't "AmEx is evil" — the lesson is that a real business has to absorb the punch and reset. If your model snaps the moment a bank changes a policy, you don't have a business yet, you have a hobby with revenue.
The data picks the product, not you. This came up four or five times in chat. Stop sitting in your bedroom agonising over what to sell. Helium 10 to find opportunities. Score My ASIN to qualify them. The data is screaming the answer at you — your job is to stop guessing and start listening.
Highlight Reel — Best Moments From The Live
November 24 was my best month ever: $37,000 in gross profit. One single month. Last 12 months: just under £600k in sales.
The hours nobody admits to: "Anyone who says they're doing FBA in 1–2 hours a day is lying." I worked 9–5 + 7:30pm to midnight, six nights a week, for two and a half years to get here.
Start with £100 and second-hand books: Scout IQ, charity shops, focus on textbooks and box sets. Skip random fiction. That's the £100 playbook.
Amazon's not saturated — your strategy is: "It's saturated if you don't know what you're doing. If you do, there's loads of opportunity." The biggest wholesaler I know of does over £100m a year. The market is fine. Your strategy might not be.
Hot tub & pool chemicals: Came up in chat. £1.5m UK market doesn't sound massive — Spain or US would be the better play if you're going private label in that niche.
One viewer dropped this: "I have a PR product with 14% conversion." That is OBSCENE. With a 30% margin? Even more obscene. Genuinely happy for them.
AI me is launching: I've created an AI version of myself. The plan is to push out way more content without me having to film every single piece. Might even feature on the LinkUp socials in the run-up.
Behind The Scenes Nugget
Quick honest one: my chair is breaking.
Not metaphorically. Literally. It dropped about three inches during the live and I had to pause to laugh about it. Been streaming from a chair that's slowly sinking week by week and I've been pretending it's fine for about a month now.
It's getting fixed tomorrow. Probably.
Also — my hay fever this week has been absolutely horrific. I'm on prescription antihistamines, cetirizine dihydrochloride, AND a steroid nasal spray, and I'm still wheezing through every live. If you noticed the voice was a bit off, that's why. Spring is doing me dirty.
The kids are also currently fighting upstairs over who gets bath first, so I cut the live early to go play referee. The laptop lifestyle is glamorous, isn't it.
CTA
Three things you can do this week:
Hit the Thursday TikTok live at 9pm UK. Bring questions. I answer everything except suppliers and personal stuff.
Drop me a follow if you haven't already — we're 26 followers off 10,000 and I'd love to hit it on a live.
The LinkUp is in 58 days. That's the gaming-week content series we did last year that hit 7 million views in 7 days. This year is going to be enormous. AI me is probably making an appearance. Keep an eye on the @ScoreMyBusiness LinkUp account.
Same time next week. Bring the questions. Bring the energy. I'll bring the answers (and hopefully a chair that doesn't sink mid-stream).
— Chris
P.S. If this is the kind of unfiltered FBA take you actually want in your inbox, hit reply and tell me what you want covered next week. The lives are driven by the chat — this newsletter should be too.
