Kolin Jones: Six Months, 2,500 Emails a Day and the First Amalfi Jets Flight

The beginning of Amalfi Jets wasn't a scene of champagne, polished aircraft interiors or wealthy clients waiting on a runway. In Kolin Jones's telling, it began with a student looking at a map of the sky and asking a question: if the airlines were barely flying, why were so many private jets still moving?

That question led him away from the career path he had imagined for himself and toward a business he didn't yet know how to build. He had aviation knowledge, curiosity and the confidence to investigate. What he didn't have was a customer list, an established name, a large bank balance or a ready-made place in the private aviation industry.

The story of Amalfi Jets is often told today through its scale and visibility. The more revealing chapter is the first six months: the moment the idea took shape, the research that gave it a reason to exist, the partner who joined him, the thousands of messages and the first flight that turned a new company into a real operating business.

The moment the idea began

Jones's interest in flying started when he was young. In an April 2026 interview with Skift's Suite Success, he recalled taking his first flying lesson at 13. He returned to lessons over the following years, began training more frequently as a teenager and described earning his pilot's licence at 17. He went on to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he was working toward a commercial pilot certificate.

His plan was to become an airline pilot. Then the pandemic disrupted that route. Jones watched older students lose airline job offers and graduation start dates. In his interview, he recalled seeing some of them turn to delivery work because airlines had stopped hiring. At the same time, he was thinking about the cost of continuing his training and the student debt that would come with it.

One day, he opened FlightRadar24 and looked at the aircraft moving across the map. Commercial traffic had fallen sharply, but private aircraft were still flying. He wondered whether private aviation might be holding up better, and whether companies in that part of the industry were hiring pilots.

Some weren't. So he asked himself a different question: if he couldn't enter the sector as a pilot, who was actually selling the flights?

That search introduced him to private jet charter brokerage. Rather than owning an aircraft, a broker arranges a charter by finding an available aircraft through an authorized operator, putting a quote together and coordinating the customer's booking. Jones saw a way to remain in aviation while building something of his own. It was a business model he could investigate without first buying a jet.

Learning the market by pretending to be a customer

Jones has described himself as inexperienced in the private charter business at that point. He was young, new to the commercial side of aviation and conscious that he needed to learn before trying to sell anything. His answer was unusual: he invented a customer.

He created an email identity for a fictional wealthy man named James Middleton III. As Jones explained it, he assumed that wealthy people often had a number after their names. He used the persona to contact charter companies, request quotes for different routes and see what the market would offer someone who appeared ready to spend money.

The exercise was more than a price comparison. Because Jones was a pilot, he could look at the aircraft being proposed and question whether the claims made sense. In the Skift interview, he recalled one quote that suggested an Embraer Phenom 300 could carry 12 passengers nonstop from Los Angeles to New York. He knew that didn't match the aircraft's practical capacity and range.

He also began checking aircraft registration details against public Federal Aviation Administration information. He recalled finding a very low quote attached to a registration number that, when he checked it, didn't appear on the relevant charter certificate and was associated with an aircraft he said had been scrapped years earlier.

Those examples are Jones's recollections from his own early research, not an independent audit of the companies he contacted. But they explain the problem he believed he had identified. A customer or executive assistant arranging a flight might not know enough about aircraft performance, operator credentials or pricing to challenge a questionable proposal. Jones believed a brokerage built around aviation knowledge, careful sourcing and clearer communication could offer something different.

The research changed the idea from a vague interest into a business proposition. He had found a problem he understood, and he thought he could build a service around addressing it.

From Jones Jets to a partner at Starbucks

The first working name was Jones Jets International. Jones later joked that it wasn't a particularly good name. More importantly, the idea was still only an idea. He hadn't yet built a company capable of taking a booking from enquiry to completed flight.

He reached out to Calvin Yoon, a friend from high school with a strong interest in finance and business. The two met at a Starbucks near their old high school. Jones explained what he had learned about charter brokerage, the inconsistencies he believed he had found and the opportunity he thought was sitting in front of them.

In the interview, Jones recalled Yoon responding enthusiastically and agreeing that they should build it together. The partnership brought two different strengths to the same problem: Jones's aviation background and early market research, alongside Yoon's finance-oriented perspective.

They chose a new name, Amalfi Jets. It wasn't named after the Italian coastline, as people might assume. Jones has explained that it came from Amalfi Drive, the street where Yoon grew up in Pacific Palisades, California.

By May 2020, the pair had made the decision concrete. They created a website and a company email address. They had a name and a way for someone to contact them. Now they needed the one thing a new brokerage couldn't manufacture on its own: a customer willing to trust it with a private flight.

The long stretch when nobody answered

Jones has been unusually specific about what happened next. He and Yoon needed leads, but they didn't have a network of wealthy travellers to call. Jones has said plainly that he didn't know rich people. So they started looking for people who might know them.

He searched for attorneys in Los Angeles, reasoning that lawyers could've clients who needed private aviation or could introduce the founders to people who did. The outreach expanded. In the Skift interview, Jones recalled that whenever he was back from university, the two founders would meet at the same Starbucks and work until each had sent 2,500 cold emails.

The message was direct and unglamorous: they were Amalfi Jets, they could help arrange a private charter, and the recipient could contact them if the need arose. No elaborate campaign. No famous ambassador. No large advertising budget. Just an introduction repeated at a scale that would've been exhausting for most people to sustain.

Jones had made the volume itself part of the strategy. In a separate conversation on The James Altucher Show, he described comparing his intended outreach with what he believed competitors were sending. If another company sent a few hundred emails a day, he reasoned, sending 2,500 meant compressing several days of their activity into one. It was a way to compete when the young company couldn't compete on reputation or size.

He set himself a six-month test. If he kept sending that volume of messages, he believed it would become statistically unlikely that nobody would buy anything. That was his theory. The reality was less glamorous: the founders had to keep doing the work without knowing which message, if any, would lead to a sale.

There is no public account that tells us exactly what Jones felt every evening during those months. It would be easy to dress the story up with invented scenes of panic or certainty, but that wouldn't do justice to what he has actually said. What the interviews do show is a young founder who turned uncertainty into a measurable routine. He couldn't force someone to respond. He could decide to send the next email.

Six months later, the first reply

Then, about six months after the outreach began, someone answered. The customer needed a private aircraft for a round trip from San Francisco to Cabo. For Amalfi Jets, this was the moment the founders had been working toward. But an enquiry wasn't yet a flight, and a new brokerage had to prove it could deliver.

Jones described using publicly available information about authorized charter operators to identify companies that might have an aircraft available on the requested dates. He contacted multiple operators, asked who could cover the route and collected quotes. The founders now had to compare availability and pricing, decide what to offer the customer and coordinate a real trip.

The task was a different kind of test from sending emails. They had to move from selling an idea to managing the details of an actual charter. The right aircraft had to be available. The operator's price had to be understood. The customer's request had to be translated into a workable itinerary. And the young company had to make good on the promise it had made in its emails.

The first flight was a $500 loss

In the Skift interview, Jones recalled that the operator's price was about $35,000. Amalfi quoted the customer $34,500. He briefly misstated the figure while telling the story, then corrected himself. The important detail is that the founders deliberately priced the first booking below their expected cost, accepting a loss of roughly $500 to make the offer competitive and win the customer.

Winning the booking created another immediate problem: Amalfi didn't have enough cash in the bank to pay the operator comfortably. Jones said the founders had applied for an American Express card and used it to cover the cost of the flight. As he put it in the interview, they were two 19-year-olds putting the transaction on a credit card to buy themselves time.

That detail is easy to turn into a neat entrepreneurial slogan, but it was a real financial risk. A credit card didn't remove the $35,000 obligation. It shifted the timing of the payment and gave the founders a short window in which to make the business work. Jones said he thought of Amazon's early customer-first approach: accept a loss on an initial transaction if it helps earn trust and creates the possibility of a longer relationship.

He recalled the first sale as a moment of excitement. They had done it. They had found a customer, sourced an aircraft, arranged the trip and completed the flight. The first transaction hadn't made them money, but it had made something else possible: they could now point to a real customer who had flown with them.

The follow-up that turned one booking into a beginning

After the flight, Jones contacted the customer. He thanked him and asked him to get in touch when he needed another trip. The reply was exactly what a young company hoping to build repeat business would want to hear: the customer had two more trips planned.

There was more. The customer also offered to introduce Amalfi Jets to a friend who had had a bad experience with another provider. One booking had produced the possibility of repeat business and a referral.

Jones described the growth that followed as a gradual process, with business spreading through those relationships. Amalfi remained a two-person operation for roughly its first two years before the founders began adding people. In the same 2026 interview, Jones recalled revenue of about $2.8 million in 2022 and $3.5 million in 2023. Those figures are his recollections in the interview, not independently audited figures presented here.

The first customer didn't make the company successful overnight. What that customer gave the founders was evidence that the model could work, an opportunity to serve someone again and a route to another potential client. The business began to grow one relationship at a time.

What the beginning tells us about the founder

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Jones's early story is that he didn't wait until he knew everything about the industry before entering it. He found a gap in his own understanding, investigated it and used what he already knew about aviation to ask better questions. Where he lacked experience, he looked for information. Where he lacked connections, he created a way to reach people. And where the first opportunity demanded more than the young company could comfortably afford, he was prepared to take a calculated risk.

There is a distinction between being ambitious and being willing to do the unremarkable work that ambition requires. Jones's early approach was built around the latter. The research wasn't glamorous. The outreach was repetitive. The first transaction offered no immediate financial reward. Yet each stage brought the company closer to something it couldn't claim before: a completed flight and a customer prepared to return.

His story also illustrates an important feature of entrepreneurship: the original idea is rarely the finished business. The idea may get someone started, but the ability to adapt, find the right people and earn trust determines whether it has somewhere to go.

Today, Amalfi Jets is also known for its public-facing content and social media presence. That chapter came later, after the foundations of the business had been laid. The early story is a reminder that visibility and credibility aren't the same thing. Before an audience could see the company, a customer had to experience it. Before the brand could become recognisable, the founders had to give someone a reason to remember its name.

And that brings us back to the first customer. The significance of that flight was never simply that an aircraft travelled from San Francisco to Cabo. It was that a person who had never done business with Amalfi Jets had trusted two young founders with a substantial journey, received the service he had asked for and was willing to consider them again.

For a new company, that's a far more meaningful beginning than a launch announcement or a polished website. It's the moment a stranger becomes a customer, and a customer becomes a relationship. Amalfi Jets had finally earned its first place in the market. What the founders did with that opportunity would be the next chapter.