Welcome back to Incorporating SuperPowers and folks, if you’ve ever been in a situation where you were just fed up with what was going on in the workplace, perhaps you’re sitting there right now, and you’re finding yourself realizing that, you know what? You’ve had enough. Then this conversation today is for you. My guest today is Seth Kniep, he is the founder and creator of Just One Dime, and today we’re going to talk about building a better life on a dime.
Seth has got a very, very cool backstory. He comes from the corporate world. He worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, if not the biggest company in the world, and he reached a point where he just had enough. He had been thrown under the bus and had enough. Since that time he realized he was an entrepreneur, went out and conquered the Amazon world, and now has a team of people that help build Amazon stores and train people who are wanting to find new ways to get a better life on a dime and grow their money. Seth, welcome to the show.
Justin, thank you so much for having me on.
This is good. We were connecting a little bit before the call here and your story, I think there are so many people that have similar experiences in the workforce of just not being appreciated, the political BS that happens in corporate America, just in politics everywhere, people are just tired of it. It takes a special person to be able to jump out of the corporate world and into the entrepreneur sector, because it is really a leap of faith, but talk to me a little bit about the concept of Just One Dime, where did it come from?
Negative emotion. I know that’s not the fancy thing to say, but it’s true. I think a lot of people, get negative emotions and they tear us apart. Or the other option is to let it channel us to do what we need to do to change our situation. Instead of focusing my blame or upsetness on the company, although in this situation I was sharing with you before, what they did was wrong. What my manager did was wrong, but it turned up to be a blessing so, yeah, negative emotion.
I had to change. I got to a breaking point. After that meeting with my manager, where I was thrown under the bus for doing exactly as I was told, and this was done in front of my subordinate, and I was pretty much shamed in front of my subordinate, it just put me in a horrible situation, it was so distastefully done. I’m all about if there’s a problem, you confront the person in private, absolutely. But if there’s a real issue, you don’t do it in front of a subordinate, and then say things like, oh, I’m so sorry Seth treated you this way, and, how dare he? It was insane.
I did exactly as I was told, Justin, so that pushed me to a point because I worked from home, my wife was in the same room. She came upstairs where my office was and she could tell I was pretty distressed. As soon as I got off the video, I turned to her and I said, “I’m done. I’m building a new life for our family. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to find a way.” It was a few weeks or months later that I came up with this concept, how many times do I need to double the dime to blow past 100,000?
The answer is only 20. It brings you to right over 104,000. That’s when I got this idea, you know what? What if I take time every day just to go out and start talking to people, what if I double my dime? What if I keep trading its value to get to 100,000? For some reason, Justin, 100,000 was like a really big, significant number to me. I felt like, once I got there, I could break away from all this, and it gives me some budget room. That’s almost two years of living expenses for a family of six, even in Austin.
I think the 100,000 mark is, for a lot of people, that’s kind of like the magic number. It’s a comfort zone. You’re not lower-middle class, you’re not an upper-middle-class. It’s like if you can make 100 grand and get a better life on a dime, especially if you have a family that you can make it work, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs, that’s one of the magic starting numbers known. Even if you stay there, you know that you’re going to be fine and you’re going to be able to provide for your family, give them a better life, and all of those types of things, but you did more than that, what came after the 100 grand?
Yeah. I got up to $400 just for asking, just walking around asking. At one point I evened out the number so I could come home and put my $10, my 20, my 40, my 80 into a little envelope next to me, to the right side of my desk. Once I got to the $400 mark, I used that to purchase my very first Amazon product, which was these little cremation urns that hang on a necklace around your neck. First I tried selling those on eBay and, man, I had studied so hard how to succeed on eBay and it just didn’t work.
What I didn’t understand is there were so many sellers already selling that exact same product, I was technically trying to launch what you would call a me-too product. Hey, me too, I can do that, but they already had reviewed it. They already had a lot of status on eBay and ranking, and I was the new kid in town. Then I said, “Well, I heard about Amazon, why not try there?” So I created a listing and it took off. From there, once I started getting 10 sales a day, each sale was about $10 profit, so $100 a day was a lot of money to me at that time.
I thought you know what? If I can do this once, I can do it a million times, and that’s where it really started to grow. We got to our 100,000 within the first, right around the six-month mark from when I started selling on Amazon. Some of it was bought and resell. Some of it was selling toys. We started doing clothing. My wife and I would go to a discount place, we’d find shirts that were discounted with a unique design on them, we’d buy it, and if it arbitraged really well on Amazon, where we buy at a discount and sell at a higher price, piggybacking on a current listing, then we would go and make our own custom version of that through a supplier in China.
That’s later when I discovered how Alibaba works because first, it was DHGate. That was my very first product order. Then I learned that Alibaba gives you access to a lot more options, and that’s when we started to just grow. That’s when people started asking me, “Hey, how are you doing this?” Especially when I left Apple, they’re like, “Okay, what did you do? I want to know what you’re doing.” That’s when I just started coaching people for free to give them a better life on a dime, and that really started filling up my time.
I’m like, “I can’t do this.” And we were also starting to do Airbnb real estate as well and selling on Amazon. I couldn’t do it all, so that’s when we said, okay, we have to build a scalable system, and it was one night at a coffee shop where my son and I, we sat down, and he’s my co-founder, and we just sat down and we wrote up a plan for how to scale the training for Just One Dime, and that’s when it was born in October of 2016.
Wow, so 2016, you’ve been at this getting a better life on a dime now for just about five years. I got to ask, because the concept of going into Amazon, I know, can be scary for a lot of people, and on the backside of the break here, I want to get into the conversation of, what’s realistic, what’s possible, what do people need to understand as it comes to investing into online opportunities, such as an Amazon store, but before we go on break, where can people find more information about you?
Just go to JOD.com, which stands for Just One Dime, and all our information for Instagram, YouTube, tons of free content, what we do, our services, is there, JOD.com.
JOD.com. Folks, this conversation, when we get back, we’re going to pick up here a little bit about building a better life on a dime, because I want to make sure that you understand that this is a phenomenal opportunity, especially with where Amazon’s going and so forth, but I want to get real here as to what it really takes to understand the ins and outs of that, and I know Seth is going to be able to provide some valuable insights because he’s got such a remarkable story to share with you. Stay tuned, we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window
