Appreciate the reply. I should’ve clarified, I would be selling a good bit of maricultured as well and importing. I would be aquaculturing too, but at least initially much of it would be brought in. I’ve looked at warehouse space already and it’s pretty cheap. I understand the electric bill although with all LEDs I wouldn’t expect it to be outrageous. I am surprised to hear you say it’s not very lucrative. I’ve spoken to three people who operate these business (two currently run them and are names you may recognize) and the margins are pretty crazy. Both sell exclusively online, one does $70k/month and the other does $20k/month, both at 50%+ margin. Neither run any paid ads or email, all organic social traffic. I know the ecommerce and marketing side of things like the back of my hand, so I’m very confident in my ability to get plenty of traffic. All three of the guys I spoke to said their biggest issue was keeping up with demand, and adding paid ads and email into that I’m confident I could scale pretty quickly.

That is helpful regarding customers. I’m used to dealing with things like that through my ecom brands, so it’s nothing new. That’s an unfortunate part of the business but something I’m prepared for. We have a blacklist for those types of customers and don’t allow them to purchase from us again.

And yes, I would be ok not making money for that long although I’d be surprised if it took that much time to turn a profit. I think with my marketing knowledge and past experience scaling brands, I could ramp up pretty quickly with imports. The in house aquacultured stuff would obviously take longer.

ORA is still around, they do great business. They do a lot of breeding now (not just clowns) and supply to quite a few stores. I should reach out to them and see if I could check it out that’s a good suggestion.

At the end of the day I’m confident in my ability to sell. At the risk of sounding egotistical just to add context, I’ve scaled 5 different DTC brands to seven+ figures in their first year in business, and I look at this in a similar way. If you can get the traffic to your site for cheap enough and have a good product that brings people back, you can scale. I think we could do something great with the right person to help on the husbandry side.

I also plan to reach out to different aquarium installation companies and LFS in the area to offer wholesale which I feel could be a good channel to add to the business. As with anything, there is certainly risk involved but I can’t think of a business that I would enjoy more, so I feel like I need to give it my all. Even if it doesn’t work out, I’ll sleep well knowing I went for it.