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$3,000,000 The First Year In Business With One Simple Idea? (15)

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Ya ok so I know we are a CPA centric place.....so bear with me while I digress....

E-comerce....ya its not sexy, ya they don't don't have awesome beer pong party's

But 3 million in the first year in business selling a simple case for a iPad?

http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...case-top-shop/

So he comes up with a simple design....has it built, then sets up a Shopify shop and proceeds to make 3 million his first year?

Of course lets understand that this wasn't all profit....but none the less it does cause one to raise an eyebrow....

I mean the guy built a solid multi-million dollar asset from just one simple idea, 1 product.

So I was curious if any of you have ever tried to go down this path of "legitimate" online sales and if so what where the pitfalls you ran into? Would you do it again? What prevented your success or made it?

Discuss.....

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Yeah i got a few good ideas, but issues i run into is implementation, trademark, patent rights, copyrights, all that shit that i have no idea how to go about.. not to mention the actual design and creation of the product.. and also distribution besides just going on Shopify..

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well having done a little research into it.... fulfillment is simplified these days....as there are companies that do it (like amazon)....and its not that bad of a cost....they handle it all....you just ship the product to them...

so ya product design/manufacturing.....that is a bit complicated....still again...so many custom shops out there that will do small jobs...(piece counts)....so your initial investment isn't that high....

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I think the biggest hurdle is believing that your idea will actually sell after you put in all the hard work & $ that's involved with starting an actual product. So many people do this and make 4 sales over the year

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agree..i think thats the biggest obstacle..i'm pretty sure that everyone of us had a couple ideas for products..but turning them into reality is another thing..because you need a realatively big investement upfront without the security that it will back out for you.. and e-commerce can be sexy..way more than affiliate marketing if you do it right...and it's highly related to online marketing because you have to get buyers somehow.i mean STM is a "product" too if you want and i think you guys are doing some pretty huge volume too with it :-) although it was build with another intention? congrats btw...in my opinion it doesn't make any difference if you sell a "material" products like iphone accessoirs, informations, a service, knowlege, memeberships, leads etc..in the end it all comes down to selling a service..it's all the same only the initial investement is different. we just have a old fashioned way to think about it...if you want to dig into this a little bit deeper check out http://sdlogic.net/

"Don't sell the drill. Sell the hole the customer will make with the drill."

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I got into the single product ecommerce thing for a while 2 years ago but gave up because I couldn't find anything that had good profit margins. I talked to a bunch of suppliers in china and had some samples sent over but shipping was soo expensive on small orders that it killed any margin. You literally had to order at least half a container of something to make it work. But at that level you are dealing with big $$, and bunch of headaches like shipping, customs etc. I have a good friend that runs a granite business and he spends 2/3 of his week on the phone coordinating container shipments from china. I would love to try again someday if I find a good idea and a good supplier.

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the pitfalls are the cost of the product, shipping and advertising, 3 ongoing cost entities that will bump up the price of the product, and the profit margin
is not as high as an info product. an info product only has a one time product creation cost, zero shipping cost, and only 1 ongoing advertising cost to worry about.

still...selling legitimate products is sexy to me!

for me, the most important part of selling "real products" is not so much the product but the copywriting, pow wow graphics and
knowledge of traffic generation that's important. the product can be tweaked and improved along the way, once the sales comes in.

product should be priced below $100.

1 more thing going for dodo ipad case is they control their own manufacturing cost, so that's one more plus factor they have
in their control. they're not affected by the "pricing" or "quality" mercy of a supplier.

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So the real trick is to make something so simple that the start up cost won't even matter and any loss isn't too large/significant. In other words just keep it simple and you can avoid putting in more work than is needed to test the market.

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key for me are a couple of things:

1) Laser focus on your most passionate customer (you??)
2) Find their most urgent problem, pain or frustration
2) MVP - Minimum Viable Product
3) High Margin -> What Recession?
4) Then Scale

The worst thing you can do is work for a year building a product/business, launch, and see it fail.

But luckily these days you can build your MVP within a couple of days/weeks.

Whether its online or offline.

Take Zaarly. The concept for this service was taken from idea to MVP in a weekend.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/m...s/id348690336#

Or take a look at http://www.kickstarter.com/, like this project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ne?ref=popular

$670k in pledged funding, and they only needed $75k

Insane thing is:


Kickstarter is great cause you can also do price sensitivity checking. 2310 pledged $59 where as 2288 pledged $79 -> an extra 44k for a slightly higher spec product!

You might not be able to do it in a weekend, but if you yourself are not the most passionate user of your service, find a couple that are and get them involved in the early design & testing phases.

Dan and I followed this exact same process when we build noipfraud.

And it works.

Then when you have your product/service, some passionate customers, and your first bunch of sales under your belt, refocus and decide on the longer term purpose/product of your business.

Now something like this would make one awesome follow along!!

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On a side note, I met Patrick a few years ago at iphone dev camp.

At that time he was working on a directory/site for apps which monetized with the apple aff program.

I guess he realized trying to make money off low margins was not going to scale.

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The key is customer development and firmly implanting a valuable feedback loop.

Make sure that demand exists for your product/service BEFORE building it.

There are countless opportunities out there for creating value - but just like those people who will never make it as successful affiliate marketers - some people just don't have the ambition to work at it.

A few valuable resources for those of you looking into this route:

Paul Graham's Essays (especially the one's on creating wealth and startups)
Steve Blank's book '4 Steps to the Epiphany'
Eric Ries book 'The Lean Startup'

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Was this the iPad case being discussed?: http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2012/01/...-to-extinction

Even if not, it's pretty funny. The comment section is pretty amusing too.

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rofl...

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Lmao

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lool @ naildogs comment

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