This Founder’s eBay Side Hustle Led to a $92M Acquisition

Lior Pozin started his ecommerce business at age 14 as a side hustle. His first sale was a cell phone, which he originally intended to buy for himself. He noticed the phone on sale on one website at a significantly cheaper price than what it was selling for on eBay. So, he copied the product to eBay at a competitive price point, changed the pictures and made his first sale within three hours.

By 2016, when he was 21, Pozin had grown the side hustle to $6,000 in revenue per month selling various products, and he wanted to automate tasks.

He had an idea for a platform that would automate dropshipping, the ecommerce business model he used, where an online store sells products to customers without having to stock or ship the products themselves. Instead, when a customer orders an item, the store forwards the order details to a third-party supplier that then ships the product directly to the customer.

The idea became AutoDS. Pozin aimed to solve his own problem — he wanted to create 100 paid dropshipping stores and manage all of them. He aimed to automate tasks like product sourcing, order fulfillment and inventory management, so he coded the first iteration of AutoDS himself.

“I didn’t have any money to invest, so I just developed everything by myself,” Pozin tells Entrepreneur. “I’m a developer, so I just started to code everything, and the first revenue was just me coding.”

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Nine years later, AutoDS now makes tens of millions of dollars in revenue and has brought in over $150 million in dropshipping revenue for its over 100,000 paying customers, Pozin says. The startup grew to 250 employees with no external investment and was acquired by freelance marketplace Fiverr in July 2024 for $92 million.

Pozin, now 30, is still the CEO of AutoDS and runs the company as a separate business unit within Fiverr. He says that the key to AutoDS’s success was creating a unique product that put everything a dropshipper needs into one place, like automatic order processing, tracking updates and returns, so store owners don’t need to manage those parts manually.

“With AutoDS, it was more about listening to the customers and going really, really aggressive in terms of all-in-one,” Pozin says. “Being an all-in-one platform helped us charge our users for higher prices. It helped us get to a much wider spectrum of users. We kept listening and introducing new features.”

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AutoDS makes money through several different avenues. The first method is through subscriptions for dropshippers, with the average plan costing $40 a month, according to Pozin. The second is through credits. When a user wants to fulfill an order using AutoDS, they have to pay for the credits required to fulfill it. AutoDS also receives a cut of each sale it fulfills from its suppliers.

How Pozin got started dropshipping

When Pozin got started with dropshipping at 14, he used Amazon to figure out which products were trending and copied the products to his own store.

“I didn’t try to reinvent the wheel,” he says.

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Pozin kept dropshipping as a side hustle until he started AutoDS. The company took off immediately and obtained its first monthly recurring revenue two months after it launched. From there, it kept growing more than 100% per year consistently, he says.

Pozin says that consistency is crucial to success in dropshipping.

“I believe that there is no dropshipper who is not successful,” Pozin says. “There are just dropshippers who didn’t try enough. To me, the difference was that I just didn’t give up.”

Pozin immigrated from Ukraine to Israel with his family, and he grew up with a “survival mindset.” When he encountered difficulties dropshipping, he knew he had to survive and pay the bills.

“I’m someone who just doesn’t give up,” Pozin says. “That’s what drove my success in terms of the mindset.”

Related: This 29-Year-Old Founder Took a $150,000 Pay Cut to Become CEO of His Own Startup. Here’s Why He Says It Was Worth It.

Why AutoDS grew and early challenges

Pozin says that AutoDS grew because he took an “aggressive” approach to growth. For example, for the first five years, he took a “very minimal salary” and reinvested nearly 100% of the company’s profits back into the business.

Hiring was one of the most challenging aspects of building the company. Budgetary constraints made it difficult to hire the right people for the right positions.

Pozin addressed that challenge by taking a “slow” approach and only hiring after he saw proof of concept for that specific need. For example, if he wanted to run Google campaigns, he would first figure out how to create one. Only after he proved to himself that it was worth it would he hire someone else to take on that responsibility.

Related: This Founder Solved His ‘Biggest Mistake’ to Go From 0 to 500,000 Customers

Pozin’s best piece of business advice is to listen to the market, which many founders forget.

“They’re just running to hire and to raise money instead of thinking for a moment about what the market really needs and focusing just on that,” he says. “That’s the key.”

Lior Pozin started his ecommerce business at age 14 as a side hustle. His first sale was a cell phone, which he originally intended to buy for himself. He noticed the phone on sale on one website at a significantly cheaper price than what it was selling for on eBay. So, he copied the product to eBay at a competitive price point, changed the pictures and made his first sale within three hours.

By 2016, when he was 21, Pozin had grown the side hustle to $6,000 in revenue per month selling various products, and he wanted to automate tasks.