How I launched an Amazon business in less than 10 hours a week

It was 2012. The economy was in shambles, my industry was reeling, and I was increasingly being asked to do multiple jobs at work. I could barely keep up.

I loaded my iPhone with apps like Evernote, Outlook, Mail, and Agenda to keep track of to-dos, appointments, and meetings. But I found myself more unfocused and lost in the swirl of life than ever.

I started using an old-fashioned notepad for my to-do list, and liked it. Then I started printing my Outlook calendar as well. That worked better, too. On those printouts, I’d add notes: memorable weather, funny things people said, ideas. These pages became meaningful, so I started three-hole punching them and storing them in a binder.

I quickly realized a few things. First, I was remembering things better. Second, I was much more organized and productive. And third, I’d unwittingly created an artifact of daily life that was unlike anything offered by a diary or a digital to-do list. It had personality and presence. And permanence.

I thought, Why not design a simple one-page worksheet that incorporated all the elements and dimensions of a day onto a single sheet?

It was this realization that would drive me to start the Active System Company, a firm that designs and publishes “forms and formats for life.”

It’s not a large business, but at the end of its first year, it generates enough profit to cover my mortgage. It runs more or less on autopilot thanks to outsourced bookkeeping, manufacturing, and fulfillment. It doesn’t distract me from my day job, so I still bring home an adult-sized paycheck.

It’s fun, and it’s something people find interesting to talk about.

The seed was actually planted by Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek. In the book, Ferriss encourages you to develop a product from scratch, offload all of the work to other people, keep what’s remaining of the profit, and move on to something else. Create and outsource, spending about 4 hours a week involved only with the most important parts of the business — the products and the customers.

Here’s how I applied this to launching a business.

The step-by-step of launching a business that runs on autopilot

In my spare time, I started designing prototypes of a paper-based personal organization system. The first ones looked like this:

I’d print out two or three copies, use them, make improvements, and then print them out again. I also asked coworkers for feedback. This process repeated for a year or so. The design, layout, and usefulness slowly got better and better. The second prototype looked like this:

I sent the prototypes to friends and family with an urgent plea: Please use this booklet to keep track of your work life for a few weeks and let me know what you think. Suggestions rolled in. I made adjustments and created another set of prototypes.

At the same time, I did a Google search for “business management” and the name of my town in upstate New York. It wasn’t long before I was meeting with a two-person company that would do anything necessary to manage my business, no matter how small or how large, for $35 per hour. Revolutionary.

I armed them with a spec sheet for my notebook and asked them to contact ten commercial printers for quotes. They also set up my bookkeeping. Meanwhile, I finalized the designs, settled on a name (The Archer Planner), and picked a printer. Soon the presses were rolling.

My marketing plan was simple: Sell on Amazon exclusively, using the excellent Fulfillment by Amazon program. After the product was printed, I sent pre-paid mailing labels to my printer, which shipped directly to a fulfillment center. Days later, I was up and running on Amazon.

That was a year ago. Today, the business essentially runs itself. My business managers send me a simple profit and loss statement and balance sheet every month. When inventory gets low, I look for customer feedback, adjust my designs, and send the files back to my printer. They print the books, ship them to Amazon, and on it goes.

In my spare time, I work on other booklets. I have ideas for things like wedding planning journals and travel logs. I will soon bring one of those to market. My goal is to launch one new product every year. I want to build the business over time, but I don’t want to bite off too much or move too fast.

I wouldn’t say launching the Active System Company was easy. But it wasn’t exactly hard either. I have learned a lot of lessons along the way. Here are the five biggest: