Michael Schneider – Co-founder of Gecko Travel Tech

How does Michael make money online?

Michael is a co-founder of Gecko Travel Tech, a company which primarily sells phone wallets online.

This video will give you a feel for the product:

Gecko’s phone wallet is a private label product, meaning they found a manufacturer that already produced similar products and ordered their own unique version with the Gecko branding.

Most of Gecko’s sales comes via Amazon, as reported in a December 2019 profile of the business.

How much money does Michael make?

Gecko generated $600,000 in sales in 2018, according to the aforementioned profile.

The business was on track to break $1 million in sales in 2019, which works out to ~$88,000 per month.

Michael and his co-founder Murray say the don’t pay themselves a salary and only take a yearly dividend that can range from 0 to $50k each.

If we wanted to, we could be pulling out around $20k a month, but keep in mind it is very important to use the profits to build inventory and infrastructure if you plan on having triple-digit growth, year over year, and have something on the shelf to sell.

We have decided to use monthly profits for investment in inventory and instead pay ourselves a nice dividend at the end of each year.

How did Michael get started?

Michael and Murray started the business in August 2016.

Michael comments:

In the early days, although we spent most of our time growing Gecko, we still found ourselves needing to hold down other jobs because there are a lot of ups and downs while you are figuring out the system.

Murray adds:

We both worked on Gecko without pay for over a year. However, we also spent 6-12 hours a day doing the jobs that paid the bills.

One of us had to make the jump and quit all the other jobs that generated our money to live on and take a meager pay out of Gecko and focus only on Gecko Travel Tech work.

I did just that right after my daughter was born and it felt like a huge risk to me at the time. My wife and I moved to her hometown in the Thai countryside to reduce our expenses as low as we could and took a run at it.

Michael joined me a short 6 months later in this singular focus for Gecko, and we both took such a small amount of money from Gecko to live off.

It was a tough time, but we bet on ourselves and eventually worked our way up and up.

It apparently took about 12 months until Gecko was able to generate $1000 per month profit consistently, but that profit was always reinvested back into the business.

Read more about the company’s origins and Michael’s background here.

• Start learning e-commerce with these top-rated courses

What type of online business does Michael have?

According to our framework Gecko is a physical product business and would be considered a Level 5 online business.

• Learn more about physical product businesses and see other examples