Sean Riley from DudeWipes say Tiktok + Amazon should be your whole focus for 2026

It’s 2026. Stop Overbuilding. Start Selling.

There’s a quiet shift happening in consumer brands right now.

Not the flashy kind.
Not the VC Twitter kind.
The kind that actually makes money.

The playbook Sean Riley laid out is simple, uncomfortable, and very real.

Launch on TikTok.
Sell on Amazon.
Ignore almost everything else.

That’s it.

For the last decade, founders were told to do everything at once:

• Perfect Shopify site
• $30K tech stack
• Meta ads that “work at scale”
• CAC and LTV gymnastics to justify spend
• Brand guidelines before customers

It looked sophisticated.
It felt professional.
And it quietly burned a lot of cash.

Most brands didn’t fail because the product sucked.
They failed because they overbuilt before they ever proved demand.

TikTok isn’t a marketing channel anymore.
It’s where culture gets decided.

You don’t launch with ads.
You launch with belief.

You let creators talk about your product the way real people do:
Unpolished.
Opinionated.
Sometimes messy.

No scripts.
No brand voice doc.
No approval chains.

Just phones, opinions, and distribution.

Word of mouth becomes content.
Content becomes sales.

And the best part?
You don’t have to be right. The algorithm will tell you.

TikTok Shop isn’t perfect.
It’s chaotic.
It’s still early.

That’s exactly why it works.

You can see what converts in real time.
You can watch creators outperform your own ads.
You can test pricing, offers, hooks, and positioning without months of planning.

You’re not guessing.
You’re shipping.

Then there’s Amazon.

The place people already trust.
The place they go when they actually want to buy.

You don’t need to convince someone how checkout works.
You don’t need to explain shipping.
You don’t need to fight abandonment flows.

TikTok creates demand.
Amazon captures it.

Amazon feeds your bottom line.
Your bottom line tells you the truth.

No spreadsheets required.

Here’s the part most people skip.

You do this until you hit $10M.

Not because $10M is magic.
But because by then, you’ve earned product market fit.

You know:
• Who buys
• Why they buy
• What messaging works
• What actually scales

Only then does complexity make sense.

Maybe you add Shopify.
Maybe you build email.
Maybe you layer in Meta.

Or maybe you don’t.

Maybe you just double down.
Refine the same play.
And run it again to $50M.

In 2026, the advantage isn’t being smarter.
It’s being faster.
It’s being closer to the customer.
It’s letting reality guide decisions instead of decks.

Build where people already are.
Sell where people already trust.
Listen to what the money tells you.

Everything else is optional.