How I Built a $2B Amazon Agency from a Spare Bedroom in Kansas City

I started Marknology from a spare bedroom in Kansas City with zero clients, zero funding, and a laptop that overheated if I had too many tabs open. Today we manage over $2B in revenue for 300+ brands on Amazon. This is how it happened.

The Beginning: Freelancing on Upwork

In 2015, I was an e-commerce manager going through a divorce, recently moved back to Kansas City from Tampa. I was reading financial blogs about paying down debt, and one article changed my trajectory: instead of picking up a side hustle like bartending, find freelance work that builds your career.

I got on Elance (now Upwork) and noticed something interesting. People needed help on Amazon, and nobody was doing it well. The platform was still mostly books and early private label products. No conferences, no courses, no "Amazon gurus." I saw a gap and filled it.

I became a top 10 freelancer in the world on Upwork for marketing. The only one in the top 10 doing Amazon. If someone was looking for Amazon help, there weren't a lot of us to go around.

I took projects for $250 that I would charge $5,000 for today. I spent so many hours on each project that my effective rate was maybe $5 an hour. But I was learning. Every listing I optimized, every ad campaign I ran, every product launch I managed was building something I couldn't see yet.

Landing the First Real Clients

My first big proof of concept was a local Kansas City company, Faultless Starch. They had always been a B2B company. We started putting their products on Amazon in 2017 and saw massive growth within 30 days. They were spending $10 to $13 per FedEx shipment on a single can of starch. I showed them how FBA could get that down to $2.99 per unit, picked, packed, and shipped anywhere in the US in two days. We saved them over $15,000 a month just on shipping alone.

That kind of result gets people talking. One client referred another. Then another. I went from freelancer to agency without ever making a conscious decision to start a company. The demand pulled me forward.

Building the Marknology Effect

I developed what I call the Marknology Effect. It is not one magic trick. It is a system built from thousands of hours of testing across hundreds of brands. The right listing optimization, the right advertising strategy, the right launch sequence, the right creative, all working together.

If you just give attention to a handful of products and treat every listing like it is your only listing on Amazon and really give it the love and attention it needs, that one product can be just as valuable as a hundred you are just trying to get by with.

We proved this over and over. Clients with four SKUs doing $3.5 million on Amazon. Not because they had more products, but because we gave each one the full treatment. While bigger agencies spread themselves thin across thousands of SKUs, we went deep.

Scaling Beyond Myself

The hardest part was not the Amazon work. It was building a team. I brought my sisters on board. Brooklyn became COO, Veronika (who has a political science degree and a master's in environmental science) became CMO, and Rho joined as well. Between us, we have over 60,000 combined leadership hours on Amazon.

We are a Kansas City company building brands nationally and globally. That matters to me. I grew up all over the world, but KC is home. This city gave me the space to build something, and I want to give back to it. Learn more about our team and approach.

Where We Are Today

Today Marknology manages over $2B in revenue across 300+ brands. We have gone from a spare bedroom to a real operation with a full team of specialists. We work with brands of all sizes, from startups launching their first product to established companies doing eight figures.

But the thing I am most proud of is not the revenue number. It is that we still operate like that scrappy freelancer who took $250 projects. We still treat every brand like it is our only client. We still pick up the phone. We still care. That is the Marknology way.

I share more of this story on the Startup Hustle podcast, where I have been a host for years. If you want the unfiltered version, go listen to some episodes. I hold nothing back.