Amazon FBA seller since 2014. I build the tools I use myself — and I still sell on Amazon every day.
I spent nearly twenty years as a hardware engineer before I bought a book on vending machines from Amazon and decided to start a side business in 2013. A few months later I heard a podcast guest talking about Amazon FBA, ordered my first shipment in late April 2014, and within a year I had left engineering for good.
I started by driving to local stores. That got old fast. By 2015 I was sourcing 100% online — and quickly hit the wall every OA seller hits: I was spending more time hunting deals than buying inventory.
So I hired a VA team. Then I started a small Facebook group for online arbitrage shoe sourcing (still around, 2,500+ members). Then I built gatedlist.com in 2015 — a shoe-only lead list for sellers who wanted what my VAs were finding without paying VA hourly rates. It was the first thing I'd ever shipped that people paid for.
In late 2018 I launched QikLists — the multi-category version of GatedList. Same vetting, broader catalog. That ran for the next eight years.
In 2026 I rebuilt everything from the ground up as QikLists 2.0 — same vetted leads, but with live per-account eligibility checks, stock and price monitoring multiple times a day, and the on-the-fly knockout filters I wished I'd had as a buyer. It's the lead list I would actually subscribe to.
Around it, I've built a small stack of sibling tools — all of which I use myself, every week. I call the whole thing QikStack.
Family time, my church, camping, badminton, cooking, and whatever book I'm working through. The Amazon business pays for those things. The tools pay for the freedom to take a Friday off without thinking about it.
When you subscribe to a lead list, you're trusting somebody else's judgment about what's worth your money. I'd want to know who that somebody else is. If you're still reading, you probably do too — and now you do.
Every message lands in my inbox. I read and reply personally, usually within a day.
