How did you end up in this crazy world?

The Free For All Lounge
#1

I’m interested in the journey people have taken to get here. Wait til you see the dumb mistake I made part-way through. My story goes a little something like this:

I’ve dabbled in online marketing, ecommerce lots over the last 15 years, but never really stuck with it or had any major success. Recently I decided to have another crack at it.
I was hunting around for products to sell and settled on well designed teapots. Did all my research, spent hours scouring Aliexpress trying to find good ones and kept seeing cool teacups. After a while it dawned on me that I should probably sell teacups as well. People bought more of them and there were so many cool designs out there. So I did more research to identify ones that would sell well.

I was part-way through this journey when I read an article about what makes a good ecommerce product and realised that I really had missed some key attributes. Crockery is hard to ship and people don’t buy it that often. So I scrapped the first brand, and all the brand imagery and shifted into a product in the tea space (this wasn’t the dumb mistake).

I saw that there were waaaaaay to many generic competitors so decided to create my own private label brand. Cue more research (can you see my favourite activity yet?). Product research, packing research, fulfilment research, sample orders on Alibaba…

I tried out Facebook ads, but here’s where I made my dumbest mistake. I setup the product, and got the ads running. 24 hours later I was checking out my site and realised that the product I was directing the ads to was showing as out of stock! Not a good plan if you want buyers to convert.

:rofl:

Of course my new product needed an Instagram page. So I set one up and decided to learn how to grow an instagram following. I came across all the websites that offer this ‘amazing’ service where they like other people’s pictures for you. Wow, and it only costs $50 per month per account. Well that seems reasonable. After all I’m going to get all these new followers who are going to buy my products.

Then I came across BHW and and then MPSocial and my mind expanded :exploding_head:

So now I’m on a new stage of my journey. Who knows where it will take me next…

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#2

God damned bro, such a long story that made you came here ehe

We’re here for so many different reasons :rofl:

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#3

I wrote my own bot to grow my personal IG last year. I was really stuck on 6/5 so I started searching the internet, first on BHW then here. Didn’t even know there is a whole community of people doing the same thing until June. lol

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#4

I think my mum had an Itch and my dad scratched it?

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#5

Were you able to turn a profit in the end?

#6

:joy::joy::joy: I actually thought the OP was talking along these lines before I read his post and realized it is about IM

#7

I read the post.
I felt it important to focus on the basics.
Walk before run etc :rofl::wink:

#8

Hey, you said you are in ecommerce for 15 years. How has the industry changed in this period and do you see something that has remained the same?

#9

I think the main thing that has changed is how easy it all is now to get set-up.
The first online ecommerce thing I did I had to mash together an open source CRM (vTiger), Filemaker Pro and some crazy Wordpress plugin hybrid thing (I don’t even remember how I did that part).
Now you just sign up to Shopify and it all happens easy presto.
I think on the other hard it’s just much harder to get visibililty. It feels like very micro-niche has hundreds of people competing for it.
The other big thing was that you couldn’t just jump on Aliexpress and find thousands of things to sell. There just wasn’t any real route to easily access products from Asia. If you wanted to sell a product from Asia you got on a plane and used your feet to find products. The same for packaging, shipping, fulfilment, none of that stuff was very advanced.
I remember looking round a factory in Guongzhou and being amazed at the complexity of a real life production line run by people. All the little steps that came together to create the product you held in your hand.
The thing that’s most the same… all the gurus who promise they have the next big thing that will make you rich :rofl:

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