I read a few days ago an article about a 20 year-old man called Ben Gulliver, a furloughed salon worker who is making £12k a day with his ecommerce businesses.

Impressive stuff.

Here are a few links

https://metro.co.uk/2021/01/22/furloughed-salon-worker-earns-12000-a-day-selling-teeth-kits-13950921/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-worcester-55707027

It's an incredible story.

But as someone who works in ecommerce and digital marketing launching not only my own sites but also having working with big brands, I can't help but think to myself

"How the fuck can a salon worker with almost 0 digital marketing experience do this?"

I genuinely like to see people do well, but as you can tell I was a little sceptical to say the least.

I mean maybe he got lucky, or had some help, I dunno.

So I decided to have a little look into it, here's what I found.

Ben's Linkedin says he is the business owner of Gullivers Enterprise Ltd.

His profile pic is of him next to his computer, open on what looks like http://Fivver.com 's webpage

Looking up the business on companies house, I can see that it used to be called MyLuckyTeeth Ltd

That makes sense as the articles do say that Ben was selling teeth cleaning devices.

…https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/12571382

So I look it up and find his website https://myluckyteeth.com/ .

I check it out, and you know what, if it's his first ecommerce website it looks pretty decent, not the best, but I've seen worse and it does the job.

Most reviews on TrustPilot are not so favourable though.

But you know what, there are always *teething* problems when you set up an ecom biz

One says he is selling the product for 4 times the price on Amazon, I admire his entrepreneurial spirit.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/myluckyteeth.com

From the reviews, I deduce that he's using FB ads to drive traffic to his website.

Although the only FB page I could find was one with 17 likes, but it looks like it was made in November, so it's likely the previous one got deleted for whatever reason.

The BBC article says Ben "sold the tooth cleaning business to an American investor for a six-figure sum after selling thousands of items during lockdown."

I've sold websites before, but not for six-figures (not yet anyway).

So I decide to look up the domain details.

I can see that the domain was registered on the 3rd April 2020.

Every time I've sold a website I end up transferring the domain to the new owner.

When that happens, the domain record will update to the date it was transferred to the new owner.

But with http://MyLuckyTeeth.com  I can see that hasn't happened. The updated date is the same as the date it was registered.

Perhaps they forgot to do that, but if I was buying a site I'd sure as hell make sure I'd have control the domain.

It's also hard to see what the person who bought the business is actually getting for it.

The business sells a low quality product, customers don't seem to be happy, it's on a website that can easily be built by anyone on Shopify, has 17 likes on FB & 385 followers on Instagram

I find it very difficult to see how this part of the story is true.

Nobody in their right mind would buy this for six figures.

You'd just replicate it, make your own site, sell the same product and copy the FB ads they are running, would cost you a few hundred quid, if that.

The articles do also say that Ben has moved onto selling gym equipment and coffee cups.

I couldn't find any information on that to look into, so can't comment on those.

Would love to know what others think?

Great spot by @absolutelyben.

He found the website where it was listed for sale (no sale price though) https://exchangemarketplace.com/shops/myluckyteeth

It's actually done much better than I thought, doing £500K in sales. Still find it hard to believe it was sold for six figures, but maybe it did

Ben is also more experienced than I initially believed.

Hang on, this article says he sold it for five figures.

This feels much more believable, but I don't know what to believe anymore.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/uknews/13826762/furloughed-bedroom-business-lockdown/

Looking at the tags on sales page (good spot by @IrishWonder).

It looks like the business would have been listed (& assume sold) for under $20,000.

Eating my words a little bit here, because it has done far better than I thought, but six figures did feel far far too high.