Rick was a burned-out corporate software director (20 years in, close to a six-figure salary) who started reading self-development books and began looking for a passive-income side project. He briefly tried Amazon FBA and retail arbitrage, then moved into Merch by Amazon print-on-demand, where he found the seller UI slow and repetitive. As a developer, he built himself a Chrome extension to fix that workflow, which became the seed for Merch Wizard.

“I wondered if I could use my coding skills to make something to help make it all easier”

His first users came from giving away simple free extensions inside the same Merch by Amazon Facebook communities he was already active in as a seller, rather than from any outbound acquisition effort.

“I offered these to the Merch community for free, and they quickly became popular in the Merch community.”

Rick ran a freemium model: a free-forever tier with limited features, then used customer onboarding emails to convert free users to the paid tier once they saw the value.

“through customer onboarding emails I was able to get them to upgrade to a premium tier and it worked really well.”