Flowster

Trent Deersmid built his first e-commerce business as an Amazon reseller starting in summer 2016, taking a radically process-oriented approach to growth. Inspired by Michael Gerber's "The E-Myth," he documented every single process in obsessive detail—using Google Docs and screenshots—and hired a team of virtual assistants overseas to execute them. By 2019, this business had scaled to $3.1 million in revenue and ranked 254th on the Inc. 5000 list. The competitive advantage wasn't technology; it was discipline and documentation that allowed him to systematically identify products, contact brand partners, and scale what competitors couldn't.

At a conference with 500 Amazon resellers, Trent spoke for an hour about his processes with no intention of selling anything. "I literally just said I'm going to firehose you with information, so good luck." What happened next shocked him: he was inundated with requests to sell copies of his documented procedures. "We sold $412,000 of them in the first seven days. It was at that moment that I had the light bulb go on." He immediately called a friend who had built and sold a software company and said: "I want to build a software company." The answer was simple: "I'm in."

They started coding in the middle of 2017. The product was straightforward: a workflow management application where users could document repeatable processes, assign them to team members, set due dates, and track completion through checklists. The key differentiator for e-commerce was pre-built content—Trent contributed roughly 70 processes from his own business (taking a year to create), giving new Amazon sellers an "Amazon Seller Playbook" they could immediately deploy without needing additional training. The first version sold as a one-time fee, which generated millions in cash flow but limited recurring revenue.

Flowster launched in 2018 and grew primarily through two channels: word-of-mouth from Trent's podcast ("Bright Ideas E-commerce," which gets 170,000 starts per month) and organic SEO. The freemium model attracted 5,000 total users; roughly 1,000 paid the one-time fee for the full Amazon Seller Playbook, while 500 converted to recurring subscriptions at an average of $20/month—generating approximately $120,000 in ARR by the time of this interview. Churn was reasonable: 9.48% gross MRR churn with 2.67% net MRR churn, indicating 5-6% expansion revenue from customers adding more users or templates.

Three things drove traction: (1) **Genuine problem-solving**: The playbook solved a real need for Amazon resellers who didn't know how to systematically source and scale. (2) **Content as distribution**: Trent's podcast and organic SEO brought constant inbound interest without heavy paid advertising. (3) **Bootstrapped profitability**: The business ran at break-even for years, then at modest $20k/month burn after hiring a VP of marketing, funded entirely by cash from his reseller business with no outside capital. The CAC of $115 to acquire a $240/year customer was compelling.

Trent recognized the market size limitation: only ~4% of Amazon resellers exceed $100k/year, and even with thousands of users, the addressable market was capped. He's now building a second product targeting brand owners and manufacturers who want to launch their own Amazon Seller Central accounts—a much larger TAM with tens of thousands of potential customers in North America alone. This new offering will launch at $99/month subscription pricing, significantly higher than the legacy $15/month per-user model, driving ARR up substantially as he scales the SaaS business.