My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work is all

My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work is all operations research + grunt work. We do mid eight digits in revenue. A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position themselves online strategically, but that team couldn't deliver results. As a grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost (school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got some initial results. Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would've had a more peaceful life toeing the 9-5. ===== I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable for me to do: 1. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and/or money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off affiliate fees. 2. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they don't layer into my big business. Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive surplus, "Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM". Most ideas end up not working out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.