Quick one. Two things happened this week that you need to hear about, and one of them might be happening to you right now.
American Express cut my credit limit in half. Overnight. No warning. 70K down to 33K for no reason I could get out of them. And I'm not the only Amazon seller it happened to — a load of us got hit in the same window. If you're running Amex and you've been scaling, go check your spending power right now. I'll wait.
Done? Okay. Let's talk about what I learned and what you should do next.
Key Takeaway
Here's the core lesson from this week's live: if your business depends on one credit line, one supplier, or one marketplace, you don't have a business — you have a hostage situation. Any one of those three can turn on you on a random Tuesday and take half your oxygen with them. Amex took half of mine. I couldn't order stock for two months. If I hadn't had cash reserves and mature supplier terms in place, the lights would've gone off on what is otherwise a genuinely healthy business doing £455K in the last twelve months.
The second thing that hit me this week: I'm pretty sure we're past the tipping point on AI and VA work. I've now got eight bots running an entirely automated Etsy business end-to-end — no human in the loop. Image gen, listings, sourcing, the lot. I'm spending nine hours a day in Claude and I'm not even halfway through what's possible. Anything a £10-an-hour VA was doing for your store last year can be done by a well-configured agent this year, for pennies, 24/7, without ever needing a holiday.
The sellers who lean into this over the next 6–12 months are going to look back and realise they got a once-in-a-decade productivity arbitrage. The ones who don't are going to wonder where all their margin went.
Highlight Reel (Best Moments From the Stream)
🚨 Amex credit cut story + what I did in the two months of forced radio silence
💰 Why £300–£500 is all you actually need to start Amazon FBA (and why every guru is lying to you about the "minimum investment")
👀 Shoutout to Cam — in my live every week, never paid a penny for mentoring, just hit £30K a month and climbing
🤖 Built an 8-bot agentic workflow running an Etsy business on complete autopilot via Claude + Railway
🛠️ ScoreMyASIN is LIVE — Selling Partner API integration pushed tomorrow, Chrome extension next week
🥊 Hot take: VAs are going to be out of work and it's going to happen fast
US $617K in revenue in the last 12 months (about £455K) at 15–20% margins
🎮 The Royal Link-Up is officially 72 days away — got on the phone to Maz and Evra to get the actual number because it was doing my head in
🃏 Grading pile update — got a PSA 10 candidate off to grading, + 108 Ascended Heroes packs and still no SIR
CTA
Three things if you want to go deeper this week:
Check your Amex spending power right now. Seriously. Do it before you forget.
Grab the free trial of ScoreMyASIN at scoremyacin.com — the Selling Partner API integration goes live tomorrow, which means you'll be able to connect your seller account and get your own ungating + hazmat check directly in the tool.
Come hang in the live this Thursday at 7:30pm UK time. Every week. Completely free. Bring your questions, ask the ones you think are stupid, and meet the rest of the community while you're at it.
See you Thursday.
— Chris
