From selling textbooks on Amazon in 2008 to selling $25 million via drop shipping,

is that still a viable business model?

Today, we're talking with Nathan, who's also going to tell us all we wanted to know about hiring freelancers and VAs.

How's it going, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton. I've got with me Nathan Hirsch today. And Nathan, we are going to talk about a lot of cool things. You're in Florida right now? Yeah, I'm in Orlando. It's bright and sunny. Nice to 75. A little bit better than than when I saw you last, which was in the negative 20 windshield of Brooklyn, right?

I couldn't even stand outside to get my Uber. That's how bad it was. Yeah, that was absolutely ridiculous. I used to live in New York and I don't think it ever had gotten that cold. It was just for us,

me being from California now and you being from Florida. They're like, okay, we're going to give a warm welcome to these sunny guys here, huh? And I live in Florida. I have no winter clothes. I was up there in a sweatshirt. Oh my goodness. Oh, my goodness. All right. So I want to talk a little bit. A lot of our listeners are Amazon sellers. And you kind of have pivoted a little bit away from that, but you started off as an

Amazon seller. Did you not? Yeah. I started back in 2008 before the gurus, the courses, the software.

I got in right at the beginning. Oh, okay. And how was that?

Were you doing textbooks back then? Or were you doing private label or wholesale? What was it like

back then? Yeah. So I started off with books at textbooks. I was in college and I wanted to make

some extra money on the side. So I took some money that I made from my summer jobs and I bought people's books

competing with my school bookstore. And I started listing the products on different websites,

distributors. And I came across Amazon and I started to sell more and more books there. And I mean,

this was 2008. No one knew what Amazon was. It was a bookstore. People didn't understand it. No one was doing it.

And I saw that they were just starting to sell some other stuff. So I kind of had this

concept where I wouldn't have to warehouse anything that I could sell products that I didn't

really have, that I could build a relationship with a supplier or vendor, distributor.

They would ship that product to the end consumer and I would make whatever the difference was.

And I would handle the customer service.

And it wasn't until years later that I knew it was called drop shipping.

But that was the basic concept.

So I was selling these books and I started to experiment with computer games, video games, DVDs, sporting

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