I'm currently in the SFP trial but not too excited about it.

I absolutely want to be grossing $3 million a year in a few years and think it's realistic. There are plenty of motivated $3 million/year sellers and I've met a few.

But I agree there's a limit on growth. Looking at the top few companies, that limit is about $100/million a year in gross revenue.

As revenue increases margins tend to decrease, but at my level I'm able to make 20% net margins and I know some bigger sellers who are also at those margins.

I guess it doesn't compare to 90% margins of software, but nothing can.

20% margin? Are you sure? Have you accounted for shipping fees, cancellations, ads and returns?

I rarely have met sellers who exceed 5-10% margin

I started last year with 10k in the bank and ended with around 100k. I know I made 30k or so from various unrelated stuff, but the 20% number is realistic.

if I were you, I wouldn't apply for funding. I would just go ahead and scale it.

For our startup funding is life or death situation. The number of users is overloading our CPU and if we don't scale up, everyone leaves.

I would love to avoid approaching VC's and spending months talking to them, demoing them products etc. I would rather be working and scaling up my own product

Are you profitable? Can you work smart and reduce CPU usage, cache static info, etc?

Raise by offering yearly discount for upfront payments to subscribers?

Yes I am profitable but I can't take more users and I might lose the existing ones because the system is overloaded and the accuracy of ML algorithms are laughable.

From ikeboy above:

> I would love to run a tech company, and code on the side and to some extent code tools for my business, but I feel safer in a business that's actually bringing in money.

It looks like you and ikeboy would be competing in the same space, but they have actual experience as a customer for the problem that needs to be solved.

ikeboy: Skip YC, study marketspace tooling, refine using your existing business to dogfood, sell those tools as a SaaS. Buy me a beer if you get rich.

I've been thinking about that for a while, actually. Existing services are pulling in 6 figures of subscription fees monthly (e.g. Tactical Arbitrage, thousands of subscribers at $100/month). But I couldn't build something like that alone, would need to be a team and there's no way I could manage that kind of complex software and also run a reselling business.

I try to be the encouraging voice on HN, so here goes my pitch:

I think you could most definitely build it alone. Start with an MVP. Don't know enough code to build an MVP? Learn to code. Ruby or Python IMHO. Once you've got an MVP, dogfood part of your business through it. Iterate. Slowly, run more of your business through it. Once you're driving your entire business off of it, start selling it to others. You have the perfect testimonial: "We run our 300k/year business off of the platform, and its the core of our business".

You don't know what you can do until you try. Try.

Btw I checked out your extension and your fba fee calculation is broken. Lots of items have way higher fees in the extension than in reality.

Thanks for reporting it. We use javascript to calculate FBA on the extension now and use Amazon API in our site.

The Javascript is unreliable because it parses the item dimensions from the page. We can't use API on the extension because we had way too many downloads and the Amazon API is throttled.

We are working around both issues and our next update will have more precise calculation