Nerf guns saved Larry Lubarsky's life.
Well, not just Nerf guns. But also lozenges, shampoo and cookies and the thousands of items he sells>'I was dead broke'
In 2011, Lubarsky "hit rock bottom," he says. "I was dead broke, I kind of felt that my life really wasn't going anywhere, and I was in a really bad place."
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Lubarsky dropped out of high school to become a stockbroker at 17 and had spent over a decade selling stocks, but the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath took a toll and left him over $100,000 in debt.
Without a dollar to his name, Lubarsky moved in with his mother and started looking for any work he could find at pizzerias and other local businesses, any 9-to-5 job where he could earn "500 bucks a week to just pay my regular bills and start paying off some of the debt," he says.
In 2012, a friend who owned an optical store in Brooklyn hired Lubarsky to answer the phone for about $500 per week. As it turned out, that same friend had a side-business buying sunglasses and eyeglasses wholesale and then selling them>Starting his own business
The windfall from his cut of that Amazon business got Lubarsky back>How to pick a winning product
Generally speaking, the most popular items that Lubarsky sells typically fall into five categories: electronics, beauty products, groceries, toys, and health products, he says.
But, because the popularity of various products may rise or fall depending>Living the dream
Raking in nearly $20 million in annual revenue is obviously a far cry from where Lubarsky was just seven years ago, when he was deeply in debt and living at home with his mother. Now, Lubarsky and his wife, Frances, live together with their young daughter in a Brooklyn apartment and are hoping to move into a house in 2019.
Lubarsky fully credits his business for turning his life around, but just because Lubarsky's life turned around, he doesn't want to give the impression that making millions on Amazon is easy.
Selling on Amazon isn't a "a get-rich-quick scheme or something that's passive income where you do it one or two hours a day, or a week, from your laptop on the beach somewhere," Lubarsky says. "Selling on Amazon is [an] amazing, incredible business, but much like any business, it's a real business [that] requires work, it requires effort.
"I often compare my Amazon business to someone opening up a brick-and-mortar business, or a restaurant or any kind of real physical business. It requires work, investment, time, patience — there's a million different things that can go wrong, but for the person who's willing to put in the work, I think this is an incredible business."
