Feb 17, 2019 · 21m · top-founders
1303 Ebay to Amazon Dropshipping Arbitrage CEO Makes $5.4M
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of The Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, host Nathan Latka interviews Zinc.io CEO Max Kolysh on how the bootstrapped SaaS company scaled to $5.4 million in annual revenue by automating e-commerce arbitrage between Amazon and eBay. Kolysh details the mechanics of flagship product Priceyak, guerrilla marketing strategies, and Zinc's strategic transition into enterprise retail intelligence.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 35.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 4.6 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 1.3 Nathan pushing back 3.1
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 16:48 Rejecting a $25 million buyout scenario
Max dismisses Nathan's proposed $25 million buyout valuation, stating he is optimistic about much greater strategic value.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 4:46 Pressing on why Zinc does not capture all arbitrage directlyNathan challenges the fundamental premise of running SaaS for third parties when Zinc's automated scrapers could capture 100% of the arbitrage margin directly.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:05 Correcting eBay mechanics from auctions to Buy It NowMax corrects Nathan's auction example by explaining that modern eBay transactions are overwhelmingly fixed-price listings, reframing the dynamics of retail price discrepancy.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 18:02 Challenging GMV scale relative to broader retail marketNathan immediately contextualizes $260 million as unexpectedly low relative to total e-commerce volume and presses whether market efficiency caps the opportunity.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Episode Preview: Dropshipping Arbitrage at Scale | 5 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Nathan frames the business overview and probes Max on how their multi-product suite functions and where revenue originates. Max clarifies product responsibilities and explains that Priceyak constitutes roughly 60% of their revenue. | |
| How Priceyak Automates Dropship Arbitrage | 6 | 6 | 2 | 5 | When Nathan provides an example using an eBay auction for arbitrage, Max corrects him that eBay is predominantly fixed-price Buy It Now rather than auctions. Nathan then pushes on why Zinc doesn't just execute all the arbitrage themselves instead of enabling third parties, prompting Max to explain market diversification bottlenecks and localized product discovery. | |
| Priceyak Revenue Mechanics and Customer Cohorts | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 | Nathan does rapid math on customer volume and average revenue per user to estimate monthly Priceyak revenue around $250k. Max confirms the rough baseline and shares their capital history of raising less than $400k before reaching profitability. | |
| Revenue Milestones and Upmarket Enterprise Pivot | 5 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Nathan and Max pin down exact growth figures, clarifying a transition from $4M to approximately $5.4M-$5.5M. Max explains the intentional growth deceleration due to investing in team structure, PMs, and engineering. | |
| Guerrilla Marketing Tactics and Customer Acquisition | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Max details Zinc's unique guerrilla acquisition tactics, including purchasing cheap items from sellers to harvest contact details and answering Stack Overflow queries. Nathan inquires into how this translated into customer acquisition economics. | |
| Platform Risk Management and Upmarket Innovation | 5 | 3 | 1 | 3 | Nathan asks about existential platform risks from eBay and Amazon policy updates, which Max addresses by highlighting rapid seller communications. They also cover sales incentives tied to expansion revenue. | |
| M&A Perspectives, Jet.com Partnership, and Market Dynamics | 5 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Nathan asks if Max would sell the company at a 5x multiple ($25M), which Max rejects in favor of higher strategic valuations. Max reveals their prior vendor role powering product fulfillment for Jet.com prior to its Walmart acquisition. | |
| Arbitrage Market Size and International Growth Frontiers | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Nathan expresses surprise that Zinc's driven GMV ($260M) is not larger given the size of e-commerce, prompting Max to explain market fragmentation, in-house tools by top sellers, and international growth areas before moving through the Famous Five. | |
| Episode Recap: Zinc's Bootstrap Scale and Metrics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Nathan delivers a solo recap summarizing Zinc's revenue metrics, customer count, and low funding history. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Kolysh: Priceyak accounts for about 60% of Zinc.io's revenue
“About 60% of the total revenue of the company, I would say, comes from Priceyak.”
Zinc's Priceyak automates 20,000 to 25,000 daily orders on Amazon
“And we place like 20 to 25,000 orders a day on Amazon.”
Kolysh: Zinc's co-founder was a major arbitrage seller in high school
“My co-founder was actually one of the biggest arbitrage sellers when he was in high school and that's kind of where part of the origins of zinc came from.”
Long-tail arbitrage niches are too fragmented for software companies to pursue
“There's a lot of niche opportunities that aren't super, you know, they're not million dollar opportunities each, but they may, they might make somebody a hundred K, 200 K a year. And so not an R incentive to kind of seek all these out.”
Kolysh: Priceyak has roughly 1,000 customers with heavily skewed monthly revenue
“So we have probably around a thousand customers on priceyac and it's very skewed. So there's some big customers that pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month and there's a lot of smaller ones that pay us on the order of hundreds of dollars a month.”
Beginner sellers pay Priceyak 25% to 30% of their profits
“If you're just the beginning seller and you have a couple hundred items, you'll probably be paying us a 102 hundred bucks a month, which works out to like 25, 30% of your profit.”
Kolysh: Priceyak generates about $250,000 in monthly revenue
“Yeah. I mean, based on that, it's probably a little bit less, probably about half of that, but yeah.”
Zinc raised under $400,000 total while generating millions in revenue
“We took one 20 back then, but yeah, we did that, and then we raised a small pre-seed round after that, so the total fundraise was under 400 K”
Kolysh: Zinc Maintained Profitability for Three Years, Doubling Annually
“We've maintained profitability for the past three years, and we've pretty much doubled every year”
Zinc bought cheap eBay items to acquire dropshipper phone numbers
“So for a while you're actually just buying stuff from eBay from almost every seller. And we would, you know, our office was basically filled with junk. We threw a couple office parties where we just gave away lots of stuff and it would be like the cheapest thi…”
Zinc's top accounts pay $10,000 to $20,000 monthly
“The LTV for these customers is probably in the high hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. And every once in a while we can, you know, hit a jackpot with a guy who's paying 10 or 20 K a month.”
Zinc used mandatory EU seller addresses for direct-mail marketing
“In the EU and UK legally sellers have to have their address on the listing. So that was even easier to get their contact information. We did a postcard campaign where we just mailed them postcards with some you know, information about Joe Lister and about Pric…”
Kolysh believes Zinc is a top-two scraper of Amazon
“We are probably like the number one or number
Two scraper of Amazon and all these other sites.”
Kolysh would reject a $25M buyout for Zinc, but accept $100M
“Twenty five million? Probably not, but somewhere. That way I'm pretty like optimistic about the company as a whole. And there's a number for sure. I mean, everybody has a number, right? It's not, you know, I would sell for a hundred for sure.”
Zinc was Jet.com's biggest service vendor prior to its launch
“We were actually like a, their kind of biggest vendor of services before they launched for a year and after they launched, a lot of their sales were actually happening through us.”
Zinc captures 20% to 40% of arbitrage sellers' overall profits
“We take about 20 to 40% of the profit that the person earns.”
Zinc drove roughly $260 million in platform gross sales in 2018
“That being said, like last year, I think in total sales driven, we, it was like two hundred sixty million or so.”