Thanks for the insight. To answer your questions:

“You put in some coupons, do they end up leading to anything? Do you get permission to keep in touch. Do you get participation in your online community? Does the scale you get help you in some way?”

Definitely yes to all of the above. In addition, it moves more inventory which allows us to negotiate lower rates with our suppliers and with FedEx.

“And if we’re pushing things to extremities, how does this model scale? If you sold 100X as much on Amazon, would it help/hinder your business?”

It would help, but that’s only assuming that I/we automate the process a bit more. Amazon provides an API so it’s do-able, but right now we’re manually spending an extra 5 minutes with each Amazon order. I’m already close to pulling the trigger and spending time trying to further automate everything with Amazon and our system, so it’s safe to say that if we hit that pt it would run like a well-oiled machine.

{The 10m/10k company can feasibly become a 10m/500k company without breaking any records.}

It’s not the extra revenue. It’s the potential. Revenue is an indicator (to the outsider) of potential.

So what is the Amazon sale worth to you, outside of the profit?
You put in some coupons, do they end up leading to anything? Do you get permission to keep in touch. Do you get participation in your online community? Does the scale you get help you in some way?

And if we’re pushing things to extremities, how does this model scale? If you sold 100X as much on Amazon, would it help/hinder your business?

I know the feeling – sometimes I start writing and I’m writing a new opinion i’m not sure I agree with but it seems to be working so I run with it…

There’s no “right” answer here, and in truth I don’t always feel the way I did while I was writing this post, but it’s a different way of looking at things that I never considered much previously.

I have disagree with you on part of this.

Who wants to buy a company with horrible margins?

“We have this big company, doing tons of business, with all sorts of employees and a giant infrastructure, but we still haven’t found a way to make more than the guy down the street who has 1/10th the infrastructure and staff”

Now they may be more valuable because they have more potential because they have more customers, brand recognition etc but running a business with low profit margins isn’t something to aim for simply because you have a lot of cash running through the business. One spike on oil prices and you are in the red, while the small guy is still in the black.

I can see in your case right now that it is only wise to throw money at all possible money funnels, because you never know unless you try all the choice you can think of. Again great post about how you and your partners are thinking and doing to grow your business.

The long term focus is definitely on quality content and a tight-nit community (which allows you to do a whole new slew of highly focused marketing), but that stuff takes years to build.

One thing I didn’t mention – that we’re starting to do with Detailed Image – is wholesaling. We have a handful of large wholesale accounts (mostly professional detailers) where margins are lower but they order repeatedly with no work on our part, and when they do place orders they buy 100 of a product and not 2.

I’m not saying we want to become a middleman (I think we’ve got more to offer than that), but being able to turn over high volumes of product in addition to getting sales direct to consumer is something we overlooked in the past more than I think we should have.

I guess you can sum everything up by saying: I/we are starting to see value in doing some higher volume / lower margin business whereas in the past it never entered our minds.