Built from hundreds of product conversations

I'm Shabbir Sharaf. For twenty years I've sourced and sold physical products online — more than 23,000 different products, in apparel, accessories, knitwear, toys, tools, gifts, and jewelry — factories and sourcing across China, India, Thailand, and Italy, with teams in New York and Los Angeles.

Twenty years of running physical-product businesses teaches you one thing: you can usually tell whether a product will work before you spend the money — if you're willing to look hard enough first.

Along the way I've mentored hundreds of people who wanted to start selling online. The questions were always the same: what to sell, what margin is enough, where to source it, how much inventory to buy, whether the idea is even worth pursuing. Different products, same handful of questions every time — that's why one 25-factor test can size up a kettlebell, a blanket, or a pair of pajamas equally well.

It's harder than it sounds. It's easy to get excited about a product, do a little searching, tell yourself the numbers will probably work out, and place the order. The problems — returns higher than you expected, shipping that eats your margin, a landed cost that's off by a few dollars — usually don't show up until the inventory has already arrived.

100K Product is that judgment, built into a tool: the questions I'd ask you over coffee, run against real research, in a few minutes instead of a few weeks.

That's the standard I hold every product to now — mine included.

Curious why $100K specifically? Read the thinking behind the name.