Hello, dont be like me!

[Arzy]

Hey everyone, I wish I had discovered this forum earlier. I've jumped into IM about 3 years ago as a hobby. I never "Made it", instead I've leared. A lot.
First and most important lesson of all, was:

1. Put in the hours needed.

I've jumped from niche to niche, never sticking and dedicating myself fully to one thing. I started with an App Store Optimisation company, helping to boost app store listings for clients. Great model, had great freelancers working for me, but didnt really know how to market it. It slowly died.

Discovered Ecommerce and started selling stuff on Shopify. What I've learned, is that you have to work ridiculously hard to make decent cash there and find a niche that you are passoinate about as well, be the customer. I've started selling Bracelets at first, just after Top Hope and pretty much every other shop had sold the living crap out of them. Didnt succeed.
So the second lesson was:

2. Know your customer.

Had no freaking idea how and to who to market it.
Then, I've made some well reasoned calculations and decided to go into cosmetics niche. I tried to dropship cheap stuff from China, but soon realised it wasnt cutting the cheese. Next leaason was:

3. Have quality products/content/service.

So I found a "real" cosmetics brand supplier in Europe and started to build a retail brand. I've had my site redesigned and built a custom back end for semi-automatic fulfillment, done some branding and social media to go with it. I didnt realise I was entering a very competetive marketplace with tight margins.
I wasnt going to win with cold traffic from running the ads. I needed something clever.

So I decided to start selling them on Amazon as well, gain some traction and customer base from there and go from there on. Since there was a big void in Shopify-Amazon integration apps, only one being good for my requirements, but charged 500$ for my 20,000 products per month. It was way too much.
So I reached out to some developers and made a custom Shopify app for Amazon integration (If any one is interested in making it a subscription business with me, hit me up.).
Next Lesson was:

4. Start cheap, no loans. Fail Fast.

I wanted to continue since I saw a big potential in there. I did a test run in Amazon for the full inventory and got 2400$ worth of orders in one day. Unfortunately I had to refund most of them, since there was an issue in suppliers warehouse integration on my side and some of the products were out of stock or no longer available.

Another few months went by redoing the same integration from scratch. About the same time I've got everything ready and working, I had to leave my day job as a sailor, so I no longer had a steady income stream. I pushed it live and ran it with 10% of the inventory uploaded for a month. I made 1500$ in revenue. Something I learned along the way, was that you'd need a decent capital to deal with amazon, since it takes me up to a month to receive payouts from them.

It's something I could not afford anymore and currently selling my site as a whole. It's quite an impressive system if you can afford to run it.

I hope some of you can avoid the same buckets I've been stepping in.

Now I'm here, browsing around to find my next thing to get my hands on.


Cheers
T

 

[Daniel Fonseca]

Thanks for the warnings, I'm a beginner so I really enjoyed it. I hope you succeed.

 

[NethGodBlack]

Hey. Interesting story. Good luck.

 

[Cyb3rt3ch]

Thanks for the contribution - I can relate to many of these points, but yeah, lessons are learnt and that's the most important part. Rare are those who hit it big since attempt #1 or even #10.

 

[Arzy]

Thanks for the warnings, I'm a beginner so I really enjoyed it. I hope you succeed.

It's a long and lonely road my friend. Seeing people succeeding on the first attempt is motivating AF, but doesnt happen to all of us. One thing in common for all of them who became the "Overnight succes wonder boys", is that they worked harder than anyone else I know.

Thanks for the contribution - I can relate to many of these points, but yeah, lessons are learnt and that's the most important part. Rare are those who hit it big since attempt #1 or even #10.

That's true. Making 1 dollar into 2 or 5 is a freaking art. People dont seem to understand it well enough. I'm turning 30 tomorrow and have been having small enterpreneurial ventures since wayy back, as far as I can remember. Havent had major success with any of them so far, but as I've said, mistakes were made, lessons learned. I wouldnt have it any other way though.

Cheers.

T