‘We’re on top of every restock’: This 24-year-old has made over $4 million off his subscription-based reselling community

JS, the founder of ShockedIO, doesn’t want to reveal his name. But he will tell you how he made $4.4 million since launching his subscription-based reselling community in 2020.

For most shoppers, a PlayStation 5 listed for $50 would seem impossible. For the members of ShockedIO, it can trigger hundreds of notifications within seconds. 

Behind the alerts is an army of software bots scanning thousands of online retailers, watching for inventory restocks, limited-edition product launches and pricing mistakes that can turn into profitable resale opportunities before retailers notice them. 

JS told Fortune that “back in the day,” he was part of a paid subscription group for shoe resellers, but he realized he could make his own community after poaching a staff developer.

“We kind of felt like this is something we could do ourselves,” he said. “It started off just being a free server. But as we kind of grew, we started to do the subscription-based model, starting at like $25 a month.”

That subscription fee, now sitting at $100 per month, has netted the Wyoming-based LLC and its anonymous founder nearly $4.5 million in less than six years, according to documents reviewed by Fortune.

The company now employs roughly 30 to 50 developers, researchers, and admins serving about 850 paid members, said JS, who declined to disclose his identity, citing financial privacy concerns.

“I would prefer to not go by my full name because I do a lot of crypto trading,” he said, explaining that he has a public crypto wallet under his legal name. Also, it should be clear that the implications of this business model fall into a legal gray area. Walmart’s terms of service states that users cannot use applications to “scrape” or “datamine” materials from its site to train artificial........

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