Key Takeaways Lior Pozin started dropshipping on eBay at 14.
By age 21, he was making $6,000 per month dropshipping, and he wanted to automate tasks.
Pozin founded AutoDS, an automated dropshipping platform, in 2016 and grew it with no outside investment before selling it to Fiverr in 2024 for $92 million.
Lior Pozin started his ecommerce business at age 14 as a side hustle. His first sale was a cell phone, which he originally intended to buy for himself. He noticed the phone on sale on one website at a significantly cheaper price than what it was selling for on eBay. So, he copied the product to eBay at a competitive price point, changed the pictures and made his first sale within three hours.
By 2016, when he was 21, Pozin had grown the side hustle to $6,000 in revenue per month selling various products, and he wanted to automate tasks.
He had an idea for a platform that would automate dropshipping, the ecommerce business model he used, where an online store sells products to customers without having to stock or ship the products themselves. Instead, when a customer orders an item, the store forwards the order details to a third-party supplier that then ships the product directly to the customer.
The idea became AutoDS. Pozin aimed to solve his own problem — he wanted to create 100 paid dropshipping stores and manage all of them. He aimed to automate tasks like product sourcing, order fulfillment and inventory management, so he coded the first iteration of AutoDS himself.
“I didn’t have any money to invest, so I just developed everything by myself,” Pozin tells Entrepreneur. “I’m a developer, so I just started to code everything, and the first revenue was just me coding.”
Related: His College Side Hustle Made $12,000 on Amazon in 2 Weeks — Then It Surpassed $250 Million
Nine years later, AutoDS now makes tens of millions of dollars in revenue and has brought in over $150 million in dropshipping revenue for its over 100,000 paying customers, Pozin says. The startup grew to 250 employees with no external investment and was acquired by freelance marketplace Fiverr in July 2024 for $92 million.
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