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Great bootstrapping thread - how to create money.

jilla82

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Ive been cruising Craigslist on my downtime yesterday and today...and what the OP did on the Lambo forum is a remarkable.
For the life of me I cant spot the real deals. Its a skill that you most definitely have to work on.
 
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awkwardgenius

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I've been doing this on a small scale with musical instruments for awhile since I know them, and whenever I saw a deal, I'd snag it and flip it. Hell, sometimes I could do it locally, if I happened to snag something that was absurdly cheap and was simply the first to jump on it. Seeing this makes me think I might need to step it up a bit to grind out some capital to get my other ideas off the ground.
 

dreaminBIG

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I was recently wondering how morally-correct this is. A friend of mine does this and I tagged along for one of his trips to pick up an item. The guy selling the TV was hurting for money and I couldn't help but feel bad for the guy as my friend talked him down in price even more. If preying on the weak is how a business model works, count me out!
 

vulcansx

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I don't know how he made so much, just in the right location? if i hustle REALLY hard i can average 150$ a day. For every offer i make there is 3 other guys offering. Things may be a bit different now compared to 2011 as well. Great guy and method though.
 
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karakoram

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Could be your niche. WHat niche are you targeting?
 

vulcansx

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I am targeting basically all the niches he mentioned that don't require a huge investment, mostly ipods, iphones, ipads, video game consoles, labtops, and other electronics (to afraid of accessories and purses) cause of fakes.

I am targeting about half the things he mentioned. Mostly things i can flip fast as well no one wants to buy something and sit on it for 2 weeks. I did a little test and made an ad with a seperate account, only to find out i got 4 lowball offers within 30 mins, so assuming only 15% of people accept your offer your still competing with 3 other people.

I'm not sure if this method is too saturated or if i just live in a terrible city to do it in. I started doing it to supplement my Iphone repair business but i think i'm gonna stick to Iphone repair, i make much more money and don't have to chase deals all day long. Is anyone making over 200$ a day doing this? If so please chime in as i'm losing hope, I don't want you to give up your methods its just nice to hear if its still possible.
 

karakoram

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Well, IMHO, using craigslist to flip stuff is great for short term cash. Scaling it can be tricky.

I heard of a woman who managed to scale it in the Dallas/Ft worth area. She was doing quite a lot of volume flippping event tickets, gift cards, etc. She had 2 full time runners to chase down product. I am not sure if she used her runners to deliver product as well. She stayed at home and managed her runners. She found the items for sale, and put together the deals. She did it all using email and phone.
 
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CommonCents

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Well, IMHO, using craigslist to flip stuff is great for short term cash. Scaling it can be tricky.

I heard of a woman who managed to scale it in the Dallas/Ft worth area. She was doing quite a lot of volume flippping event tickets, gift cards, etc. She had 2 full time runners to chase down product. I am not sure if she used her runners to deliver product as well. She stayed at home and managed her runners. She found the items for sale, and put together the deals. She did it all using email and phone.


Yep, I've been spring cleaning and decluttering for a couple months, selling a bunch of stuff on CL for a few grand so far, some stuff at or above retail haha, but most around 50-70% of what I originally paid. It's been kind of fun to discover the free money in the stuff I don't use. I have enough cables to outfit a freakin radio shack. More power to ya if you can buy and sell for profit and scale this to keep it a regular thing. But wow, the spam is really increasing for sellers, getting so many "is this item available" or other bogus spam emails i guess trying to get your email and other personal info. CL needs to clamp down on this stuff.
 

karakoram

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You have other options as well. When I was flipping camera gear, I ran ads in my local "Big Nickel" type of papers. These are those free to get classified ads type newspapers available at your local 7-11 or other convenience stores, and near the exit of grocery stores. THey are free to people who want a copy. It costs money to run an ad, but they are usually very cheap.

I ran ads with headlines like "Camera Gear Wanted" or similar. I see ads similar to this, for different niches: "Old coins wanted", "Old Guns Wanted", "Electronics Wanted" etc.

I got some of my better buys from these types of ads. I also got a lot of crap calls. The key is to really know your product and to ask the right questions on the phone when the seller calls you. You need to spend as little time actually chasing product around town as possible. Do as much as you can over the phone. Also, its been a few years since I did this. Nowadays, I would ask the seller to text or email me a camera phone photo of the item in question.
 

karakoram

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Well, IMHO, using craigslist to flip stuff is great for short term cash. Scaling it can be tricky.

I heard of a woman who managed to scale it in the Dallas/Ft worth area. She was doing quite a lot of volume flippping event tickets, gift cards, etc. She had 2 full time runners to chase down product. I am not sure if she used her runners to deliver product as well. She stayed at home and managed her runners. She found the items for sale, and put together the deals. She did it all using email and phone.

I just remembered that the above story came from the Lambo forums that MJ linked to in the OP of this thread.
 
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vulcansx

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Well, IMHO, using craigslist to flip stuff is great for short term cash. Scaling it can be tricky.

I heard of a woman who managed to scale it in the Dallas/Ft worth area. She was doing quite a lot of volume flippping event tickets, gift cards, etc. She had 2 full time runners to chase down product. I am not sure if she used her runners to deliver product as well. She stayed at home and managed her runners. She found the items for sale, and put together the deals. She did it all using email and phone.

I'm deffinetly not looking to scale it, but it's much better than being a cube sheep! Gives me lots of time to initiate my fastlane plan.

Just looking for tips on pumping out a few extra deals as i need about 5000$ to put my fastlane plan into full gear.

I find it hard to believe those guinea pigs were making 100$ average profit off each labtop and iphone and doing 35 a month. If someone lists an Iphone worth 400$ they get about 4 offers in the first hour in the 320-350 range.

If you try to get 100$ profit you will be outbid every single time except rare occasions, i'm forced to take 50$ profits. Also your idea about buying ad's i'm already taking full advantage of :) and you'r right they are golden
 

smartman

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I am having some difficulty with a similar situation and could certainly use some outside suggestion-

I have been dealing mostly in cell phones, buying off craigslist and reselling on ebay or amazon. At first, I could buy all day long and deals were available at the right price. Now, the deals are either gone before I see them(I check my local cl every 15 minutes) or I have to get forced out by my competition. The issue that I am contending with lately is that I will make an offer on a phone that is listed, or will get contacted by someone selling from an ad I've posted, and my offer is simply used for leverage to bargain a higher buying price from someone else. I make an offer that is more than fair, where I will only make about a 30% profit after ebay/amazon fees and shipping. My only conclusion is that someone else is better at negotiating with these people than myself.
I am personable, polite and am very good at reading people. I am guessing(which is why I come to you) that I am bad at bringing people to sell right away. Does anyone have suggestions for closing the deal? I have tried some tricks like "you are free to _____" with little success.
 

5holiday

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loving the thread! its interesting to apply some of the gold nuggets to other business practices.

on a side note, I hate to be a bummer but there was a thread with some guys sharing their experience doing them same thing but they were a lot of "THATS NOT FASTLANE - SLOWLANE LOL" etc. Not sure why it didn't happen here...

just a shame that others missed out one some of the knowledge to be learned!
 

Kencan98

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Is anyone familiar with the Craigslist limitations on posting?

From what I hear I can only post 1 ad per day. If that's the case, unless the process is selling high ticket items at high margins then I don't really see how decent money can come from this.

I'm going to research more on posting ads in volume because I really wanted to use this to fund my Fastlane idea.

I'll post here if/when I find a solution.
 

Runum

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Is anyone familiar with the Craigslist limitations on posting?

From what I hear I can only post 1 ad per day. If that's the case, unless the process is selling high ticket items at high margins then I don't really see how decent money can come from this.

I'm going to research more on posting ads in volume because I really wanted to use this to fund my Fastlane idea.

I'll post here if/when I find a solution.

I post multiple real estate ads on CL at the same time. No worries.

However, CL doesn't like you to have multiple ads active for the same house at the same time. Doing so will get you flagged and ghosted.
 
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Kencan98

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I post multiple real estate ads on CL at the same time. No worries.

However, CL doesn't like you to have multiple ads active for the same house at the same time. Doing so will get you flagged and ghosted.

Got it. Thanks. I guess what I read about "multiple ads" is more geared towards the people who post 200 "work at home" ads a day. I guess if you post 5 or so it will be ok.

Only one way to find out - I'll just start selling. :)
 

recon187

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Who’s going to reach the peak first? Is it the person who stands at the base, looks at the peak, and thinks all day long how this is going to be possible and how they are going to get there; or... is it the person who says look there’s the base, we got what we need, lets get started?



Success… What it Really Looks Like…
Great picture, thanks. It sums it up quite nicely.
 

sk24iam

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I use craigslist to flip cell phones in a similar way. I've found that it's pretty easy to find people desperate to quickly sell their phone faster for a discounted price. Then I turn around and sell it for more. Only part that sucks is having to constantly meet up with people to make the exchanges. Also, there can be a ton of spam to filter through on Craigslist.
 
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RHL

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1. Impossible to scale
2. Impossible to automate
3. You can never sell it as a business

I do something like this with cars. I've made numbers ranging from $8K-15k/flip. The only thing stopping me from pushing that number into the 20's or higher is that I'm under financial strain buying stuff for my fastlane that hasn't started making money yet. Also, as u/Lighthouse called me out on a few weeks ago, I was too chickenshit to go "all in" to the degree required when I first decided to explore the fastlane. I was toying with it, and I was a coward. I'll be paying for that mistake for at least the next eight months, and God knows how much longer when the snowball effect is taken into consideration.

Anyway, all that stuff you posted is true. In it's current form, my car shtick is impossible to scale or automate, and you can't sell it as a business. I can't even recruit other help, even from my most trusted and savvy associates, because my very extensive knowledge of cars and ability to "close" with salespeople at thousands and thousands less than their listing price is integral.

But consider this. Before I got a hold of MJ's book, I was making $42,000/yr working 49 weeks (3 weeks PTO), 40 hours a week. That's about $22/hr. Maybe bump that to $25 or even $30 considering I got medical/dental for free and that holy grail of all workers, an employer-contributed pension.

When I buy a car, the actual time I invest in focusing solely on that, like I did when I was working, is about 80 hours (photos, listing, picking up and returning, cleaning, meeting with potential buyers who flake out, tons of other things that increase value, etc). From that, heck, let's consider my best ever, and say I get 15K.

So, I could either make $30/hr at a desk

or 15,000/80= $188/hr flipping cars. That means every time I work 1 hour doing this, I make as much as I would working 6 hours at my desk. While the process is slow (I'm not doing one of these flips every 80 hours, I'm staying under the state cap for non-dealers of 5/yr and may have to hold a car for several months to get what I want for it), it allows me to live at the same level as my slow-lane job does, with 1/6 of the time invested. Imagine that instead of working 49 weeks, you work 8. Instead of working Jan-Dec, you work Jan-Feb, then are off the rest of the time. Like a reverse school teacher. That's what this buys, freedom of a lot of time.

The other nice thing is that a lot of the flipping happens on my time, on weekends and in the evenings if I want. As crazy as it sounds, I'd rather work 22 hours on Saturday and then not work for five days, than work 8 hours five days a week and have Saturday off. I'm young, my body recovers from a single long day. A desk job devours your whole life. Want to go to NYC to hang out on Wednesday afternoon? You can't, because of work.

Post liquidation guys, feel free to call me out if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like truly 100% passive income systems exist only in scammy affiliate marking ads. There's always some connection to time, it's just very slight in the most extreme fastlane plans, like two hours a month answering emails, responding to criticisms, on the phone, etc. Because of that, it seems to me anyway, that something like this is the seed, the germ of the fastlane, because it makes my time four times as valuable as it was before. That's disconnecting my income from my time, slightly. That's what the fastlane is all about, getting 40-45 years of work out of the way in 6-8 years. In my mind, everything that advances that goal is helping to build the fastlane mindset (at least, I hope it is). So if you're making $30/hr, and you can find some way to make that same hour worth $60, you now have to work half as long in your life, and are beginning to grasp an idea which, when multiplied many times over, will eventually have you working four hours a month at times you choose, in other words, free.
 

smartman

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what kind of cars are you flipping? that's pretty awesome.

I am at a similar spot, I am fully in understanding of the fastlane concepts, but I have been having a hard time finding anything to jump into that is technically "fastlane" since I do not have much of a technical background for things like affiliate marketing. I have been focusing on flipping, started with phones and ipads, moved to some bigger items, now onto cars and motorcycles, and figured I would keep rolling like that until I found an idea or opportunity for passive income.

I am so very badly in need of a fastlane mentor.
 

AllenCrawley

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Mike Kavanagh

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that's fine. I was under the impression it was bad form to bump older posts.
MJ wants this forum to act as a market place would. If something is relevant and useful it gets attention. If it is not useful it goes to the bottom of the barrel.
 

vinylawesome

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I was cleaning out my Evernote notes and came across the screen captures I took several years back regarding this thread and the Lambo thread it highlights. Hopefully they will be useful to some.

1.
VFE6Uau.jpg


2.
TXqiOrj.jpg


3.
w0LTFne.jpg


4.
nBEcKXG.jpg


5.
T4nTFdE.jpg


Original Source: http://www.lambopower.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=58618
 

rc08234

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I was cleaning out my Evernote notes and came across the screen captures I took several years back regarding this thread and the Lambo thread it highlights. Hopefully they will be useful to some.

1.
VFE6Uau.jpg


2.
TXqiOrj.jpg


3.
w0LTFne.jpg


4.
nBEcKXG.jpg


5.
T4nTFdE.jpg


Original Source: http://www.lambopower.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=58618


Any more notes on the gift card aspect of it?
 
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vinylawesome

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Jeremy Groover

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Cool Idea! I might try this just to pass the time. One thing though. Carefull with cars and motorcycles. Your state likely has a limit to the number you can legally sell assuming that you register them under your name. It isn't legal but many people who "flip" cars try to get the seller to leave the date blank when he signs the title so the title can be floated to the next buyer in order to avoid a) the expense of titling and registering and b) the limit to the number of cars you can sell in a 12 month rolling period. NM says you can't sell more than 3 cars per 12 month rolling period, but you sell three under yours, another 3 under your spouse's name, and so on and so forth as long as you have people willing to register the vehicle for you.


Actually in the United States you cannot purchase a car with the intention of "flipping" or profiting from it. Not even one without a dealers license. Yes I still do it, yes I don't care lol. Just figured I would chime in on this. You cannot purchase a vehicle with the sole intention of making money on it without a dealers license.

Craigslist is an amazing thing. I am not a member of the forum yet so I cannot read the thread but I love making deals on craigslist. I have been using it for right around 8 years. I would say I have made close to 10k a year off of it most of those years. I use words like "divorce, need to sell, need to sale (yes I know that is stupid, but there are stupid people on Cl), moving, needs tlc, needs work, needs a new home, get it out of here, come get it, need it gone, need it out of my driveway, medical bills, having a baby" anything of the sort. My most recent craigslist score was a 98 Harley Davidson in nice running condition that I traded one of my $500.00 guns for. With new tires and a $100.00 gas tank, I will get over 3k for it.

You cannot be afraid to hurt someones feelings or make them mad on craigslist. Beat them up on price as much as you can before you get there, that way when you get there you can beat them up a little more. Point out every defect. I even mention how long the item has been posted if its been over a month and they are desperate to sell the item. If your not going to at least make 35% QUICKLY including travel expenses then do not be afraid to walk away. Obviously if it is a bigger ticket item a lower percentage is acceptable. I usually wont leave my house if I cant make a few hundred dollars on it quickly. If I know its going to take longer to sell, I wont do it unless I make over 1k.

When I buy cars I never buy them if more then one of the 3 mains are wrong. (Interior, exterior, mechanics) if more then one is no bueno, I walk away. At that point, I wont be able to sell it quick enough or I wont make enough off of it for the money invested.

Just my .02

Jeremy
 

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