I had a rather tough time with an affiliate venture that was a short term success followed by scaling up and ultimately failing. Nothing nearly as seedy as ski

I had a rather tough time with an affiliate venture that was a short term success followed by scaling up and ultimately failing. Nothing nearly as seedy as skinny pills, but I ran a service that would alert people when "hot, got to have it, out of stock everywhere" items were back in stock at online retailers. It was a great system that grossed about 45K in the first three months with little work. I had started with one product and a simple website, so after the initial success I doubled down. I spent two months creating a site that would allow me to add more products, a subscription management system for users, and added a bunch of retailers to my web scraper. I also calculated how much revenue I made per user to figure out how much I should spend to acquire more users. Based on the result I started aggressive spending on Google adwords with the expectation of future affiliate commissions. But then the retailers caught on that I was earning commissions on items they could barely keep in stock and the gravy train came to an abrupt halt with no warning. I turned off the adwords just in time to break even. If it wasn't for Amazon.com staying true, I would have been in the red.