Episode #22 - Sam Jacobs

#15MinuteFounder

In this episode of The 15-Minute Founder, we sat down with Sam Jacobs, a drop shipping entrepreneur who hit a million dollars in sales by age 18. He’s built and exited multiple e-commerce brands, coached for Tai Lopez, and now runs a mentorship program helping people build branded drop shipping businesses from scratch.

Here’s the full conversation.

Highlights

Q: You made a million dollars online when you were 18. How?

Sam: I just opened my laptop and looked up how to make money online. But in between that search and actually hitting a million dollars in sales, most people don’t see what I went through. I figured out how to sell products online differently than everyone else — through e-commerce with zero inventory. I was a high school kid, 17 years old, working as a ball boy at the US Open and as a lifeguard just to get some cash. I tried a YouTube channel, some side hustles. Nothing stuck until I started drop shipping in 2017. My first product was a light-up dog collar. It took me six to eight products to find my first winner — a shoe spray. I was literally this close to quitting when I saw DJ Khaled holding a bottle of Crep Protect on Instagram. I found a similar product on AliExpress, ran it, hit $10K in sales, and knew I had something.

Q: Is dropshipping dead in 2025?

Sam: Yes and no. Drop shipping the way most gurus teach it — scammy-looking stores, fidget spinner type products — completely dead. The way I teach it and do it is branded drop shipping. If you don’t look like a brand, you look like a drop shipping store, and no consumer wants to buy from one. Branded drop shipping is the only way to do it correctly now. You can build something long-term, hold zero inventory, and even sell the brand — which we’ve done.

Q: You were minutes away from quitting. What’s the single biggest reason most people give up?

Sam: The rabbit theory. 99% of people are rabbits. They start a business, the excitement fades, it gets hard, they realize it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme — and then they jump to the next thing after one or two months. Real successful people all had multiple moments where they wanted to quit. The difference is they didn’t. Give it 6 to 12 months and the success rate skyrockets. Success isn’t like a 9-to-5 where every day looks the same. You might get zero results for months, and then it just comes together. Nobody talks about that six months of grinding before the breakthrough. It was all worth it.

Q: What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a day? And the most you’ve ever made?

Sam: The most I’ve lost was in the thousands — our payment processor went down while we were running thousands of dollars in ads and we woke up to zero sales. But that’s the beauty of drop shipping. You don’t hold inventory, so your real risk is just ad spend. We test products at $50 to $100, and if it brings back $200–$400 in sales, we scale it. Every single one of my winning products had a massive return right off the bat. On the flip side, my best day was $45,000 — Black Friday weekend, two stores running, one did $35K and one did $10K. We also scaled a store from zero to $300K in around 20 days. When you see the opportunity, you move fast.

Q: What’s the single biggest lie e-commerce gurus tell?

Sam: That general stores work. A general store has a ton of products and you’re just hoping something sticks. That’s not a strategy, that’s luck. What we do is one product stores. Every single one of our stores, one main product. When you build a one-product store, you’re looked at like a brand — the go-to for that product. Would you rather buy an iPhone from the Apple store or from some guy on the street? We can get a product for $5–$15 and sell it for upwards of $100 because we’ve built a brand around it. I tested the general store model with a full team of product listers, ad guys, video guys. We spent thousands on product tests, threw 70 products at the wall, and maybe one or two hit. On a real branded one-product store, one out of two hits.

Q: Is everyone cut out to be an entrepreneur?

Sam: Absolutely not. Business doesn’t care about your feelings, what you ate for breakfast, or what your morning routine is. The only thing that matters is what work you put in and how much. If you don’t have that hunger of I will do whatever it takes to win, you’ll get destroyed. Some people walk into business thinking money will just fall on them. It doesn’t work that way. Going from a $20/hour mindset — where you get paid no matter what as long as you show up — to I’m making nothing until I crack the code, that’s a huge difference. If you’re not scared to fail and fail forward, it’s for you. Otherwise, go a more guaranteed route. But understand you’re trading the dream life for the comfortable one.

Q: What ultimately motivates you?

Sam: My family. I have a son and a wife, and getting married changes everything. Before that, it was about freedom — I didn’t want to work for someone or at a job I hated. E-commerce can run 24/7 through a laptop. I went from being stuck in my bedroom for a year straight, coming home from school and putting in work while talking to no one, to traveling the world, speaking on stages, meeting people I never thought I’d meet. And that happened because I put in the work when no one was watching. Some people don’t even know how close they are to their breakthrough. I’ve seen people about to explode quit. And I’m like — you were so close.

Q: What’s the single biggest way AI is going to impact e-commerce?

Sam: It already has. If someone isn’t using AI to make at least $1,000 per day right now, they’re missing the biggest generational run we’ve ever seen. We use AI to build our websites, find products, build product images — images with models holding our products that we used to pay thousands of dollars for in photo shoots. Ad copy, brand names, logos — all AI. I have a store doing $3,000 per day right now where all the content was built through AI. It lets us launch an e-commerce business in one to two hours. That used to take days.

Q: In a world flooded with AI content, how do you cut through the noise?

Sam: First, most people don’t know how to use AI at a high level yet — so just being good at it is already an edge. Second, a lot of AI content looks like AI. Your goal is to create through AI content that doesn’t look like AI. The best way to prompt it isn’t to say “create an image for my product.” It’s to find an image from a brand doing $10M a year, and say “make this exact concept but for my product.” You take something already proven to work and apply it to your brand. The people who will get left behind are the ones who don’t lead — they follow. Understanding how to use AI to analyze competitors and recreate what’s working for your own brand, that’s the play.

Q: What’s the closest your business has ever come to dying?

Sam: The tariffs. When they hit, me and my partner called each other and it was like — whoa. Our whole model is built on shipping from China. That was the first time drop shipping felt actually dead, not just the usual “pivot and adapt.” But then “this too shall pass” kicked in. I literally tweeted that a deal with China was coming in two to three weeks. And it did. The world can’t function without China. Not right now. Not for a while.

Q: Tell me something controversial. Something you wouldn’t tweet.

Sam: Do the opposite of the losers. Re-engineer it — look at what the average person does day to day and do the opposite. The cycle is: teenage years, chasing girls, clubbing, a degree that was supposed to be the exit plan, realizing maybe it wasn’t, settling for a job they don’t love, waking up at 40 or 50 just getting by, retiring. If you look five, ten, twenty years ahead and ask how you can be different, how you can speed things up — why wait? People wake up too late. And they’ll say it a year from now and five years from now: if I only started earlier, where would I be?

Q: What’s something I didn’t ask that you wish I had?

Sam: Family. Get married young. It forces you to level up. When you’re married and you’re a bum, your wife looks at you like a bum — and that ticks a man off more than almost anything. The accountability that comes with marriage is massive. And who you get married to is the single biggest factor in what happens with your money and your life. Don’t go looking for a wife in places you won’t find one. Get married young, make money young, start everything young. And 30 is still young. What you can do in one year, five years, ten years — generational change. People think about tomorrow. Think ten years out and then work backwards one day at a time.

Q: What would you want your obituary to say?

Sam: That I was a genuine dude. Real, caring, true to myself. A family man who built a family the right way. Not the guy who flexed Lambos on Instagram to sell courses. The guy who someone can say changed their life. Every single day I try to make someone’s day a little better — a smile, a real connection, whatever it is. I’m focused on moving forward 1% every day. If I do that, the ending will be really good.