The screen burns a blue ghost onto your retinas. It’s 3:03 AM, and the only sounds are the hum of the refrigerator and the frantic click-click-clicking of a mouse that has seen better days. You’ve sent 43 messages. You’ve bookmarked 233 factories, each one a slight variation of the last, their names a jumble of optimistic English words like ‘Evergreen’ and ‘Prosperity’ and ‘Golden.’ They all promise quality. They all have the same stock photos of a gleaming, empty factory floor. And none of them, you are now certain, is the one.

Somewhere out there, in an industrial park you can’t pronounce, is The One. The Secret Supplier. The magical factory that produces your competitor’s flagship product-the one with the flawless stitching, the perfect weight, the exact shade of cerulean blue that your last 3 sample orders couldn’t get right. You imagine it’s a hidden place, accessible only by a secret handshake or a golden ticket, a family-run operation that doesn’t advertise on public platforms. This belief is a strange comfort. It explains your failure. It’s not your fault; the game is rigged. They have a secret you don’t.

I believed this for years. I am embarrassed to admit how many years. I was convinced success in e-commerce was a game of hide-and-seek played on a global scale. My first successful product, a specialized type of garden tool, was haunted by a competitor who was consistently 3 months ahead of me on every product innovation. I was losing my mind. I spent what felt like an entire season of my life, and probably around $3,333 in failed sample fees, trying to find their source. I reverse-image searched their product photos. I bought their product and looked for any stray markings on the unit or the packaging. I became a digital private investigator, and I was terrible at it. My obsession was based on a single, flawed premise: that their supplier was hiding.

My friend Sophie V.K. is a lighthouse keeper. It’s a strange job in this century, I know. She lives on a rugged patch of coast and spends her days maintaining a machine built to do one thing: be seen. Her job isn’t to conceal the light. Her job is to polish the lens, maintain the bulb, and guarantee that its beam cuts through the fog for 23 miles, without fail. The entire purpose of her existence out there is to loudly, publicly, and relentlessly announce, “I AM HERE.” The ships don’t find her by secret map; they find her because she is the most obvious thing for miles. She is a feature, not a bug.

They aren’t small, secret workshops. The factories that produce goods at scale are enormous operations. They have to be. They are shipping not just one box, but 33 or 43 containers at a time. They are moving thousands, or hundreds of thousands of units. An operation of that size doesn’t hide. It can’t hide. It leaves a massive footprint, a trail of paperwork and logistics so vast it’s practically visible from space. And here’s the part I missed for years, the part you might be missing now: that footprint is a matter of public record.

Every time a shipping container from an overseas factory arrives at a US port, a document is generated. A bill of lading. A shipping manifest. This document lists, by law, who shipped the goods (the supplier) and who received the goods (your competitor). It’s not a secret. It’s not locked in a vault. It’s bureaucracy. It’s mundane, boring, public information designed for customs, logistics, and taxation. And for the last decade, this information has been digitized. All those massive shipments, all those lighthouses broadcasting their location, are logged in searchable databases. Finding your competitor’s supplier isn’t about being a better detective; it’s about knowing which public library to visit. The truth is, most people just never bother to look because they’ve been told a more romantic story about a secret, hidden factory. The real work isn’t the frantic, late-night search; it’s abandoning the fantasy that the search needs to be frantic at all. For a fee, you can access compiled databases of us import data that turn this firehose of public information into a simple search bar.

I’ve always been someone who criticizes the obsession with shortcuts and “hacks.” I believe in doing the work, in building things properly, in understanding the fundamentals. So it feels strange to now be advocating for what feels like a cheat code. But this isn’t a shortcut that skips the work; it’s a tool that prevents you from doing the wrong work. The weeks you spend messaging 233 random factories on Alibaba is wasted effort. It’s motion, not progress. It’s trying to find a lighthouse in the fog by randomly sailing in circles, hoping you bump into it. You could spend months doing that, or you could just look at a map that shows you exactly where the lighthouses are.

This whole realization reminds me of a profoundly awkward experience I had last week. I joined a crucial video call, thinking my camera was off, and proceeded to tidy my entire office, completely oblivious to the 3 other people watching me struggle to arrange a stack of books. I felt this hot wave of exposure when I realized my mistake. But the weird thing is, my camera was always there. The potential for being seen was part of the system. My assumption of privacy was the only thing that was fake. Your competitor’s supply chain is like that. It’s operating with the camera on, right out in the open, because that’s how global trade works. They’re just counting on you not to be looking. They’re counting on you to believe in the myth of the secret supplier, because it keeps you busy sailing in circles.

Once you find the factory, the real work begins. That’s when you need to build a relationship, negotiate terms, manage quality control, and handle logistics. Knowing the name of the factory is just the starting point. It’s getting the key to the door. You still have to know how to open it and what to do once you’re inside. The advantage isn’t that you get to skip the hard parts of building a business; it’s that you get to skip the soul-crushing, pointless, and mythical quest for a secret that was never a secret to begin with.