Teachers Turned Amazon Sellers
What if We Could Create a Life We Love?
In February of 2017, we were two public school teachers, looking towards an unknown future. We knew we wanted to grow our family through foster care and adoption, but had a lot of financial goals we wanted to achieve first. One night Nate asked the question that would change how we earn money forever: “What if we started selling on Amazon?”. Alysha, always the realist, was skeptical but agreed that if we just used $100 to start, we could try it out. After lots of research and careful shopping, we made our first sale, and a lightbulb went on (literally- our first sale was a lightbulb we sourced from Walmart).
Rolling Our Profits
We took that $100, spent hours sourcing at various stores and researching, and sent in our first shipment. Soon we started making sales, and immediately rolled that money into buying more inventory. Our payouts were doubling and tripling, and with the growth we hustled after school, on weekends, and on breaks to keep our business growing. Every penny we made, we poured back into the business.
All In
The first time we paid ourselves was to use a payout to put a downpayment on our house. At the end of the school year, we quit our jobs and started working solely for ourselves for the first time. It exhilarating and terrifying to run your own business, but we loved the newfound freedom that came with working for ourselves.
Hustle Buddies is Born
Fast forward to now, and we sometimes have to pinch ourselves that this is our life. We both are home full-time, and after becoming licensed foster parents in 2019, we were insanely blessed to finalize the adoption of our two precious children in April of 2020. It’s overwhelming to see our goals and dreams play out before our very eyes. Our Amazon business is thriving, we’ve hired employees to free up some of our time, and after helping guide multiple friends and family members in starting their own Amazon business, we made the leap to start teaching others outside our immediate circles. We saw a gap in the Amazon community, and realized that there were very few positive and uplifting spaces for beginners to learn. We also noticed that while there are many knowledgeable Amazon sellers, effectively teaching others how to do it was a skill we could contribute with our teaching background. Thus began Hustle Buddies.