This Founder’s eBay Side Hustle Led to a $92 Million Acquisition

Lior Pozin started his ecommerce business at the age of 14 as a side job. His first sale was a cell phone, which he originally wanted to buy for himself. He noticed that the phone was being sold on a website at a price much lower than what it was being sold on eBay. So, he copied the product on eBay at a competitive price point, changed the photos, and made his first sale within three hours.

By 2016, when he was 21, Pozin had increased his revenue to $6,000 per month by selling various products, and he wanted to automate the tasks.

He had the idea of ​​a platform that would automate drop shippingThe ecommerce business model they used is where an online store sells products to customers without stocking or shipping the products themselves. Instead, when a customer orders an item, the store passes the order details to a third-party supplier who then ships the product directly to the customer.

the idea became autodsPosin’s goal was to solve his problem – he wanted to create 100 paid dropshipping stores and manage them all, Their goal was to automate tasks like product sourcing, order fulfillment, and inventory management, so they coded the first iteration of AutoDS themselves,

“I didn’t have any money to invest, so I developed everything myself,” Pozin explains. entrepreneur“I’m a developer, so I started coding everything, and the first revenue was just me coding,”

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Nine years later, AutoDS now generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and has brought in more than $150 million in dropshipping revenue for its more than 100,000 paying customers, Pozin says. Startup grows to 250 employees without any outside investment acquired by freelance marketplace Fiverr for $92 million in July 2024.

Pozin, now 30, is still CEO of AutoDS and runs the company as a separate business unit within Fiverr. He says the key to AutoDS’s success was creating a unique product that puts everything a dropshipper needs in one place, like automated order processing, tracking updates, and returns, so store owners don’t have to manage those parts manually.

“With AutoDS, it was about listening to customers and being really aggressive in terms of all-in-one,” Pozin says. “Having an all-in-one platform helped us charge more value to our users. It helped us reach a broader spectrum of users. We kept listening and introducing new features.”

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AutoDS makes money in many different ways. According to Posin, the first method is through a subscription for dropshippers, with the average plan costing $40 per month. The second is through credit. When a user wants to complete an order using AutoDS, they must pay for the credits required to complete it. AutoDS also gets a cut of each sale from its suppliers.

How did Pozin start dropshipping?

When Pozin started dropshipping at the age of 14, he used Amazon to find out what products were trending and copied the products into his own store.

“I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel,” he says.

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Pozin continued dropshipping as a side effort until starting AutoDS. The company took off immediately and achieved its first monthly recurring revenue two months after launch. From there, he says, it continued to grow more than 100% per year.

Pozin says consistency is key to success in dropshipping.

“I believe there is no dropshipper who is not successful,” Pozin says. “There are dropshippers who didn’t try hard enough. For me, the difference was that I didn’t give up.”

Pozin immigrated to Israel from Ukraine with his family, and he grew up with a “survival mentality”. When he encountered difficulties with dropshipping, he knew he had to survive and pay the bills.

“I’m a person who doesn’t give up,” says Pozin. “That’s what has led to my success in terms of mentality.”

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Why AutoDS was developed and initial challenges

Pozin says that AutoDS grew because he took an “aggressive” approach to development. For example, for the first five years, he took a “very minimum salary” and invested almost 100% of the company’s profits back into the business.

Recruitment was one of the most challenging aspects of building the company. Budgetary constraints made it difficult to appoint the right people to the right positions.

Pozin addressed that challenge by taking a “slow” approach and hiring only after seeing proof of concept for that specific need. For example, if he wants to run a Google campaign, he’ll first figure out how to create a campaign. Only when he has proven himself that it is worth it will he appoint someone else to take on that responsibility.

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Pozin’s best business advice is to listen to the market, which many founders forget.

“They’re just rushing to hire and raise money instead of thinking for a moment about what the market really needs and focusing solely on that,” he says. “That’s the key.”

Lior Pozin started his ecommerce business at the age of 14 as a side job. His first sale was a cell phone, which he originally wanted to buy for himself. He noticed that the phone was being sold on a website at a price much lower than what it was being sold on eBay. So, he copied the product on eBay at a competitive price point, changed the photos, and made his first sale within three hours.

By 2016, when he was 21, Pozin had increased his revenue to $6,000 per month by selling various products, and he wanted to automate the tasks.