7 min. read
Jonathan and Lejaun Holmes
Chapter 01
Starting point
Jonathan Holmes and his wife Lejaun were drawn to ecommerce through a shared love of the outdoors and travel. Jonathan had already tried building websites, while Lejaun brought social media experience. When they eventually found the right idea, the business gave them a path toward working for themselves—but the early years were far from smooth.
Jonathan started blogging in 2012. For the first few years, he said the work produced little traction because the topics did not have a strong enough audience. After that, the couple tried launching a tea company for pregnant women, investing thousands in stock and weeks into branding, but they could not find a market. Jonathan also tried dropshipping jewelry. None of it worked.
Chapter 02
Opportunity
The turning point began when Jonathan and Lejaun launched an online store selling survival products through dropshipping. Instead of trying to make every product work, they paid attention to what customers were already buying.
After a few months, Jonathan noticed that a couple of related products were driving most of the store’s sales. That gave them a clearer path: focus on the products with demand, rebrand around that product line, and build the store into a more specialized resource.
The opportunity was not just “survival products” as a broad niche. It was the realization that a tighter product focus could make the business easier to position, easier to rank, and more credible to the right audience.
Chapter 03
Breakthrough
The business started to work when the couple stopped spreading their effort across too many ideas and doubled down on the products already showing traction. Jonathan said a few related products were responsible for around 90% of online sales, so they specialized around that line and worked to become a go-to resource.
That focus helped them gain number-one rankings for several related keywords. SEO became a major part of the business, but the foundation was product-market clarity: they had found a niche where search demand, customer interest, and their own positioning could finally line up.
Chapter 04
Supplier and product lessons
In the early days, Jonathan and Lejaun dropshipped products from China. That gave them access to suppliers, but it also created quality and fulfillment problems. Jonathan said poor product quality and long shipping times caused repeated headaches, and they changed Chinese suppliers several times before finding one that worked.
Eventually, the couple looked for a local supplier. That was not instant or easy. Jonathan said it took persuasion and back-and-forth to get a local supplier to work with them using a dropshipping arrangement. Once they found a stronger supplier relationship, they continued ordering samples and monitoring customer feedback to make sure product quality stayed consistent.
The sourcing lesson is clear: supplier reliability can shape the entire customer experience. A product that looks promising can still become difficult to scale if customers are waiting too long, receiving inconsistent quality, or leaving negative feedback.
Chapter 05
Marketing and growth
For CrowSurvival.com, content marketing became the main growth engine. Jonathan said it took almost exactly a year before the site made any profit, largely because the content push happened months earlier.
The couple published almost 100 articles within two months. About six months later, those articles began generating traffic and converting customers. Their first profitable month brought in around $50, but the foundation was finally in place: focused content, search visibility, and a niche audience with intent.
The growth was not immediate. It came from doing the work before the payoff was visible, then letting search traffic compound over time.
Chapter 06
Result
According to Jonathan, once the right supplier relationship was in place, the dropshipping store thrived. The experience helped the couple realize they could build a real online business. After two years, they sold the dropshipping business for what Jonathan described as a nice profit and moved on to other projects, including CrowSurvival.com.
For CrowSurvival, Jonathan said income began with a first profitable month of around $50, then more than doubled month after month until it plateaued at around $10,000 per month.
The result was not just income. It was also a lifestyle shift. Jonathan said online success “snuck up” on them until they realized the business could support their life. At the same time, he later recognized the importance of stepping back and protecting the work-life balance they had started the business to create.
Chapter 07
Where SaleHoo fits
Jonathan and Lejaun’s story shows why supplier reliability matters from the beginning. Their early product traction could only become a stronger business once they found suppliers that could support better quality, shorter shipping expectations, and consistent customer feedback.
For sellers following a similar path, SaleHoo fits into the supplier-research stage. Before building a store around a product or scaling content and ads, sellers can use SaleHoo to compare vetted suppliers, look for local or wholesale options, and reduce avoidable sourcing risk.
The takeaway is simple: product demand matters, but supplier quality determines whether that demand can become a durable business.
