Meet the man who sells $89 million of diapers each year online

[justinhj]

It shows you can still make money on the internet even if your product is full of shit.

[kyenneti]

I don't doubt their execution, but its domain(diapers.com) might have helped big time in their success.

[AndrewJ]

Hands down, but at the same time if he hadn't run the site properly the domain would probably be linking to amazon.com or something by now.

The domain grab really was like the land grab of the west in the US, first come first serve and if you defended your property then you're now a millionaire!

[antirez]

> The year we started, our gross margins were 4.6 percent. Today, they're in the teens.

Does this mean that they earn 8.9 million every year? Or the headline mentioning "89M $" is already a "clean income" figure?

[nobody_nowhere]

I read the 89M as a topline gross revenue -- so 11.57M if that "teens" (i.e. 13%) figure applies to the past year. He's more or less admitting he can't scale while retaining that, but it's still a nice chunk of change to reinvest into growth.

[tigerthink]

Sounds like fun. I wonder though: if all he wanted to do was maximize his net worth, would he be better off hiring a statistics graduate student who knows R and training his replacement so he could go start another company?

[greyman]

No, since maximizing net worth involves much more to do.

[zaidf]

Throughout the story I kept wondering 'how old is this company?'. Till the end I could not tell.

[byoung2]

Founded in 2005

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/diapers-com

[simplegeek]

Very true. Likewise, throughout the story I kept wondering how did they start? Till the end I could not tell.

[jpcx01]

Heh, reminds me of Ashton Kutcher in the movie "A Lot like Love". His startup (which ultimately tanked in the movie) was an online diaper store.

[brown9-2]

Sounds like this guy sells a lot more than just diapers (such as car seats), the title might be a little misleading.

Pretty interesting story, thanks for posting.