If you've read some of the oldest blog posts here, you might already know that I've been trying out ways to make some extra cash online for the past year and a half or so.
I dabbled into affiliate marketing, digital products here and there, and I wrote an e-book to try and build email lists, but also got scammed with crypto and made a fool out of myself when I tried to get someone to teach me digital marketing and sales funnels on Fiver. Oh, I also tried micro-tasking and got a whopping US$3 on PayPal. I let those failures die down a little when I got my current job but have been getting an itch to try something for myself again. This time, though, I knew I would need more than just some Google searches and cheap miracle-promising online courses.
You see, I do believe in overnight success stories, but the heavy majority of the time, I know success comes from a lineage, and more often than not, a big one, of failure after failure, after failure. And I have been failing for a year. I'm glad.
In this last year, apart from getting out of the of-course-im-gonna-make-it-overnight-im-special mindset, I also stopped comparing myself with other successful people I saw online. One big wake-up call in this process was this Mikari Espe video.
There is (mostly) no overnight success, there are just people who learn from their mistakes, come up with better plans, and try again.
But let's get back to the e-commerce thing, where did that come from?
It was the middle of July and my partner and I had a birthday lunch to go to, for one of his childhood friends. While talking to a bunch of his friends, the topic of work naturally came up and I started sharing about how I work remotely for a company in Europe and deal with American, European, and Canadian clients every day. My partner shared about his day-to-day as a civil engineer, our many moves, and his many construction sites and one of his friends mentioned how he started his own paid ads management agency after several successful online stores he had. I was curious.
He told us how he started with affiliate marketing, did ok but not great, and then switched to dropshipping. After 3 or 4 months of selling nothing in his store, he got serious, changed his marketing strategy, and hit success after success. He then went on to design his own box, and wrapping supplies, and got his label on some of his best sellers. He built himself a brand. After his last successful store, he had saved enough money to start his own company and was now looking to internationalize his business.
Safe to say we talked a lot about possibilities after that.
We exchanged numbers and Instagram handles and early next week, I was sending him messages about mentoring me while I started my own thing. We discussed starting costs, and mentoring costs, set up a date, and started classes.
While his specialty is dropshipping, and whether or not I'll stick with dropshipping for a while, I'm learning so much in this process. I'm learning about competitor research, tools and apps to scale operations, and the ins and outs of supplier selection, payment, and management. I'm learning about niche selection, and store growth metrics (which I do know about because of work, but more in-depth) and I'll launch knowing I will probably not need another year and a half to figure out what works.
Guess I'm trying again and building a business
Building this business will also give me a chance to work with people near and dear to my heart. One of my closest childhood best friends is an amazing designer who will help with brand image building, color palettes, logos, and all that. My twin sister is a social media manager who will make the posts and deal with the social media accounts, and some of our other friends will come aboard as developers and whatever else I might need, that I still don't know about.
I can and will make use of my network to build a business, and that is fantastic to me.
Oh, and I'll pay, in case that wasn't clear. I want to be part of their growth as well.
So yeah, excited to see where this new venture leads me and what else I'm gonna learn from it in the months to come. X.O.
IAS