Manufacturing/Designing my Dream

[DurianGray]

Hi everyone! I'm making this progress thread to document my path on the fastlane.

A little background: I graduated from university in CA last May in engineering and got a 9-5 job.I worked at that for 8 months before quitting a month ago to focus on my projects full time. I have always been interested in manufacturing and international trade (esp. with China). IF things don't work out, the backup is to just get a Masters in engineering and coast on the slowlane for a while.

During those 8 months, I read as many books as possible, had some success selling things on ebay, got good at trading stocks/options/futures, and saved a huge deal. I moved out of my apartment in SF which was costing me an arm and a leg.... to back home at my parents just until things pick up speed. Everyday is a challenge both economically and mentally, especially when my peers are starting with a 100k engineering salary.

In the past 2 weeks I set up a website, but am still figuring out SEO and how to drive traffic to that site.

Here is the timeline:
By next week:
Finalize out of state LLC in Wyoming
Finish uploading products to my opencart website
Add a payment processor
Add social media capabilities
Get at least 1 sale
Start contacting suppliers on Alibaba

By next month:
Move to Thailand/China to bootstrap and lower costs / network with other importers
Visit manufacturers in China/ visit the Canton fair in October
Set up 2 other niche e-commerce sites
Get Amazon FBA running

By the next year:
Generate at least 1500/month from e-commerce
Build my own private label/ brand

Within the next 5 years:
Buy a rental property
Start my own company

In the next 10 years:
Own a successful design firm specializing in manufacturing products employing 50+.
This will be my legacy project.
Own 500+ rental units.


As my man Oscar Wilde said: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"

Comments and criticisms welcome.

 

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[DurianGray]

Update on import/ecommerce business:

I began the process of setting up the LLC. Got a registered agent in Wyoming for $49/year. $100 filing fee cost to the state of Wyoming. I chose Wyoming because it had lower yearly costs which is more important to me since I am starting out. Had to call them a few times to clarify stuff on their forms. I didn't know that I needed to include the words 'LLC' in my company name. From CA for reference.

I found a product on Alibaba that is selling for $10 but the cost to buy is a approx $1 and the sell through rate is 60% on terapeak. For that product, I plan on selling via ebay and amazon FBA. Messaged a few suppliers for quotes and samples.

For my ecommerce platform, I ran into troubles setting up the SSL. I bought a UCC SSl from godaddy which should cover up to 5 websites. My service provider, bluehost ran into some troubles installing it, but once I gave them a call they sorted it out. Starting out with shared hosting, but in the future will upgrade to VPS or dedicated server (if web traffic justifies it). For now, what I have works.

Looking up SEO, What I am starting out with is changing the urls to SEO optimized ones. I finished reading the SEO book by SEOMoz. It took me a few hours to figure out how to use .htaccess and going through the php code in open cart to edit the site.
I am following this link: http://isenselabs.com/posts/boosting-sales-in-opencart-seo-tips-and-social-media-activity-part-1 on how to SEO my site.

In other news, I went to an options meetup to to discuss trade and portfolio management. My commodities positions are too volatile. Need to reduce daily variance. I was originally an options/futures trader, but decided to diversify money generation methods and doing ecommerce diverts my attention from worrying too much about my positions.

To do:
1. Add a blog to the site for SEO purposes
2. Make fb/twitter/youtube/pinterest pages for this site.
3. Need to do some keyword analysis to determine what I should put in the meta tags.
4. Update products list

 

[Marius]

Hi Durian,

I really appreciate your starting off and I'd like to give you some advice related to Websites as I've got some experience in this area and I hope it will help you too.

1. If adding a blog, I suggest you to go to wordpress and install a SEO plugin called Yoast. This one it will guide you how to optimize your page. Forget about reading a lot of staff about SEO. Most of the rules are changing so only the most essential staff you should take care of.

2. Adding social pages to your site it will help you boost your site for SEO purposes and prospects and clients if used properly.

3. Keyword research is the first step! Do not create blog posts and then optimize for SEO. You should have keyword research list already done. Just follow Yoast plugin instructions (as seen on the new post page on Wordpress) and half of the battle is won.

4. I've seen you chose OpenCart. Hopefully it will work fine for you. As of my experience I had some issues when upgrading the software and I switched to PrestaShop which is running flawless and it seems to be better optimized for SEO purposes. The downside is princely addons for Prestashop when expanding functionality.

 

[1step]

I found a product on Alibaba that is selling for $10 but the cost to buy is a approx $1 and the sell through rate is 60% on terapeak. For that product, I plan on selling via ebay and amazon FBA. Messaged a few suppliers for quotes and samples.

Price on Amazon is too low in my opinion.

FBA takes $2.50 off each order (for their shipping) Amazon takes and additional 15% for their commission. That leaves you $6.00 already. You still have to get the products to amazon and pay for the products and shipping from China. At best your looking at around $4.00 per unit?

I don't think this is your winner. Try and sell something over $20.00.

 

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[100k]

Here is everything you need to know about SEO;

1) good on page SEO (have the keyword you want to rank for be in title and sprinkled 3-5 times throughout the article every 500 words).

2) add image that are SEO optimized for your keyword (i.e meta tags and the image title it self, i.e keyword.jpeg)

3) Build high authority links by that I mean, get links from pages (not websites) with PR 3 or higher with DA/PA of 30+, get as many of these as possible (100+) and only use your main keywords as the anchor text.

4) Dilute and diversify your anchor text / backlinks. Use long tail keywords / LSI keywords related to your main keywords use up to 100+ different long tail keywords. Build all sort of links, comments, profile, bookmarks, social links, blog posts etc. You want to build around 5k-50k of these types of backlinks. Also use brand keywords.. i.e if your website is called doggywebsite.com then use "doggywebsite.com, www.doggywebsite.com/, doggywebsite, doggy website, etc." as your anchor text.

That will rank you for most of your terms.

Thats the basics of it.

 

[DurianGray]

Updates on Ecommerce site:
Ran into problems with SSL certificate I bought from GoDaddy. Opencart doesn't support shared SSL certificates. I decided to go with one from namecheap which was $8.95 a year instead of $90/yr. Also fixed a lot of bugs.

Unfortunately, there was an unexpected issue today. My computer crashed. I was freaking out, but took a deep breadth and migrated all the data into an other computer and reset everything back to factory default. Got me to start putting data into the cloud via Dropbox and Google Drive. This set me back a few days. Next laptop I get will be a macbook air.

I have big concerns over getting customers to my site, especially since this is a very small niche. Building a website was the easy part, but getting people to it and placing an order is challenging to me. Thanks for the SEO advice guys! Really useful. I'm looking at PPC campaigns with google and facebook. Finally, doing research on how to design advertisements.

 

[fastattack03]

Awesome thread. Are you a member of startupbro's course?

Subscribed to this thread. good luck!

 

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[DurianGray]

Life:
6-4-2014 is the 25th anniversary of Tienanmen.

I spent 4 hrs waiting at the SF Chinese consulate trying to get a visa. At least I got some good quality reading time going through Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People".

Ecommerce:

Used Merchant Plus to accept credit card payments. I added a blog using the "Blog Manger" extension in Opencart because it has the best integration with my theme and has good SEO functions. Cost me $45. Also edited my product list via excel rather than manually inputting each item. Posted a job on odesk for SEO keyword analysis and strategy. First time using the site. Surprised by the number of responses I am getting. I am close to hiring my first Indian for $2.00 an hr. Not sure about the quality but for $2.00/hr I'll just give it a shot. Max loss should be $10. I am reading more on how to hire a freelancer.

Fiverred an SEO gig to double check my own work. Now focusing on PPC. SEO has been the biggest concern for me. I fear that my niche is too small. Using google keyword planner, the main keyword has 9900 monthly searches. However my product sells for only $25-$100. Competition is also high according to google keywords.

Importing:

I am considering another niche to focus on after this with higher profit margins. I contacted a few manufacturers on alibaba. Ordered a few samples. Got 5 samples for free with $28 shipping. Not sure if I got scammed. Unit cost is ~$1 and I can sell them for $18 on ebay. Shipping is low since it is a small item. I need to look for higher profit margins. I will attempt to private label once I send an order for 100 after reviewing the samples. Yes, I am part of the startup bros course, but the info they give is not really game changing..... yet.I feel like there are more difficult hurdles to overcome.

As Randy Pausch said in his last lecture:

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”

The push forward continues......

 

[DurianGray]

Got INSIDERS status. What a gamechanger. Been reading nonstop the past few days. Absorbing all I can.

Went to a 2 day startup summit this past weekend hosted by the Peter Thiel foundation. Got a tech friend to give me the event signup password but the organizer told me it was invite only. Bluffed my way in. Ethical? Made some good contacts. Felt a lot of ideas were too idealistic. But if those VCs give me $ again, I'll burn though it. Eventually want to do the startup route with VC money. I don't just want the money. I want the status.

Waiting to get LLC verified has slowed me down. Realized that I need to verify product and get things sold asap. So I am on ebay hustling to get things sold. I have also moved onto 2 larger niches to focus on larger profit margins. One in a booming industry.

Starting a PPC campaign on my website. Hoping to get 1 sale. Encountered error with DHL express account. I was wasting time waiting to get one setup. What I should have done was ask the seller to use their account since they do more in bulk and would have a better rate. Currently I am paying approximately $80 for .5 kg. To get a lower rate, I say you import a large amount many times a month and I think you can get a 25% discount max. I got a %20 discount starting out.

 

[DurianGray]

UPDATE
Getting things sold is the biggest issue here. I was too focused on getting the actual business set up and making the website look nice instead of making $$$$$.

So now I’m back to researching niches and trying to sell stuff on ebay. Action items should be to list items for sale on ebay and to contact suppliers.

I made a huge error when I was researching my previous niche. I had adblock on in google chrome so I didn’t see any google ads…. and because of that I didn’t notice a big competitor in my niche!!!! Shit!

My competitor sells a larger variety of products in my specialty niche and even more supplies in the overarching niche. i’m very worried. Had I know I wouldn’t have gotten into this niche.

I started a PPC campaign using Google Adwords. Using a coupon I got $100 of advertising if I spent $5. It’s my first time using adwords and I just made 1 campaign with all my keywords. I’m not sure how to split test this.

Today was a super huge mental setback. I read Amail’s and Darius’ threads on importing/ecommerce and I have some hope. At this point, I just want to have 1 sale in my 1st niche. Until that first sale, I won't be trying to source more products or focus on getting SEO. I need to VALIDATE this idea before proceeding. I am trying to figure out how to use landing pages to validate products.

Now, I will be focusing on contacting sellers on Alibaba for samples and developing my 2nd niche site after doing better keyword/competitor research. The second time should be faster.

 

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[DurianGray]

Existential Crisis:

Felt really stressed out today for some reason. I was reading about marketing your site (Traffic Blackbook 2, etc.) and many were affiliate marketers/ vitamin sellers. I dabbled in that back in 2006 when I was in high school but I wanted to avoid getting in that industry for personal reasons.

I am continuously gonna try to advertise my 1st site, but on the side. I fell that it is too small. My first day doing a PPC campaign, I got 776 impressions/ 8 clicks / avg. $0.66 per click/ CTR 1.03%/ cost $5
Gonna continue this campaign for the next few days. I am drop shipping this product so at least I am not stuck with inventory. I am trying to sell on ebay too but with not much luck. Maybe my prices are too high…

Second niche I will do stuff differently. I will first validate the market. I do that by using the keyword planner tool to find low cost PPC, low difficulty, high search terms. I want a lot of people searching for this item so then I can get a small slice of that. I will contact a shit ton of sellers to get a general sense of prices. Then I will blow up an ebay account pre selling product that I don’t have. Next is to then start selling on ebay before even making a website. Now I gotta rinse and repeat this process till I find something that sticks.

 

[DurianGray]

Think I finally found my niche. Just when things were getting hopeless, I sold something on amazon. I then contacted 25 suppliers in my niche on Alibaba. Hoping to place an order by the next few days.

E-commerce store 2 is in the process of getting set up. I realized that I needed to focus on a large enough niche. I found items on Alibaba that weren’t listed on ebay. I plan on private labeling them. Also the adwords are not that expensive and are low difficulty compared to my previous niche that just was no bueno.

I started learning copy writing. The shit I write is almost as good as sex. I want to get on the fast lane so that I could have time to focus on my writing. But this is close enough.

Traveling to Asia in less than a month. I’m probably gonna just backpack it and buy a few suitcases there and fill them up with samples. May be more cost effective since I can cram 50 lbs per suitcase.

It’s been 29 days since I started this journey. I’m surprised I got most of the stuff done that I said I would in the first post. I will revaluate myself in 1 years time and again at the 1000 day mark.

I’m going all in.

 

[DurianGray]

Took a break to get my mind together. Hanging out with friends who I will probably not see again for a few years. Spent a lot of time reflecting.

Ordered some samples. They arrived. Sold a few. Built another ecommerce website. This time I used magento. It is a lot more powerful than opencart.
Would recommend magento if you are comfortable messing around with db tables. Almost bricked my website a few times. Need to have a dev platform to test site before pushing live. Fun fact - I always thought magento was pronounced like magneto like the guy in X men.

Thinking about expanding. Packing stuff is kinda fun, but it is time consuming and I need to make this more scalable. Need to research some ebay selling techs. Don't make the listing last too long. Also I am planning to cold call a bunch of shops to try to wholesale my products. Also listening to Tropical MBA. Love their podcasts. Went to mastermind group. Realized I need more discipline. Currently reading "Think and Grow Rich" by Napolean Hill and "You can Negotiate Anything" by Herb Cohen. Gotta thank my mom for those books she bought in the 80s.

Attached are photos of my goods....
Need to do more research on shipping techniques. Also note got the macbook because of computer issues mentioned before. Go mac or goo home.

 

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[firmwear]

I am curious:

1) Are you planning to live as a resident in China/Asia or are you visiting for a short duration?
2) Assuming most of your customers are in North America, how will you fulfill orders while you are gone?

Thanks, good job on keeping up the progress. Your thread is very interesting!

 

[DurianGray]

I arrived in the Heart of Capitalism (aka People's Republic of China) a week ago. A 20 hr total trip from SFO->SEA->PEK->CAN. What a brutal trip in economy class sitting in the same row as the over caffeinated and sugar fueled toddler. Motivation for me to build those airline miles/status.

I have been recovering health wise. A few days before the flight, I got a ton of vaccinations while I still had healthcare just as a precaution (rabies/yellow fever/hepA/hepB/typhoid/etc). The thing is, you still might get a little sick as your body generates all those antibodies. That meant I had a raging fever as I flew across the Pacific. The Chinese government is known to quarantine sick people. They had infrared cameras checking if you have above normal temperatures after debarking the plane. Good thing I downed a bottle of advil before leaving the plane.

The heat, humidity, and mosquitos are killing me here. It also rains a shit ton here. I guess I'm spoiled by my California weather. Also the internet connection is less that stellar where I am. I visited some wholeseller markets but am not impressed. I will message a bunch of factories to try to give me a visit. The change of scenery is helping my mood/motivation.

I will talk to more expats here to figure out what they are up to. There are a lot of Russians and Africans here. I will visit the "Little Africa" district to figure out what those guys are up to. Otherwise I have no idea what I am doing and am just winging it.

Regarding the above questions: I got a partner in States (aka my mom (she thinks this is amusing)) shipping some stuff out. I don't many orders Will try to go fulfillment center once stuff ramps up. I also plan on being out the US traveling for the next few years. No return ticket booked.

Blog broke on my site. Trying to fix that and the SSL. Will try an adwords campaign tonight. Gotta remind myself to do mission critical shit instead of being a perfectionist.

I am currently staying in Haizhu district if anyone is in GZ and wants to hangout. I currently just spend my days in Starbucks online. I'll give GZ another few months till my visa runs out then I'll head to Saigon, Vietnam to see what those digital nomads are F*cking around with.

Attached Photo: View across the Pearl River of the GZ skyline.

 

[Leo Hendrix]

Alright dude let me know if your around Taiwan, Taipei way....I am getting into the international trade scene shortly offline though firstly.

 

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[mgore714]

Hi. I'm also 22, finished school, and am looking to start importing from China. Are you still planning on attending the Canton Fair in October? If so, would you be interested in meeting up?

P.s. Thread's great.

 

[DurianGray]

Update on this thread...

So working online in China is kinda a pain in the a$$ because of the firewalls to Google and Facebook. Also because my IP is not from the US I had to go through a lot of extra hoops. I don't advise travel / working before you set up a lot of accounts in the US. Also China is pretty expensive compared to the rest of SE Asia. Things weren't going so well I wasn't getting anywhere.

I ended up taking a break from developing my online store and went down to Vietnam. For some reason i thought that Saigon was a location independent hotspot of tech dudes. I crossed by land from China and ended up in Hanoi. From Hanoi I bought a motorcycle and rode down to Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon. It was one of the toughest things I ever did. I told myself if I survived this, I could do anything, including building an online store.

I lived in Vietnam for about half a year. It actually kinda sucked because I was lonely and my roommates were all French. I spent a lot of time reflecting in isolation and reading philosophy. I had an existential crisis like every week. The internet makes Saigon way cooler than it is... But I did enjoy riding a motorcycle around town. If I were to go back in time, I would have also been an English teacher during this time because of the low hours, micro salary, and having a community of people to help transition to expat life.

I also took short trips to Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Singapore. I found Chiang Mai to be a better location independent hub for internet entrepreneurs and Singapore to be the coolest city in the world. I eventually wanna move my company to Singapore for tax breaks lol.

Around the 5th month in Vietnam, I was about to call it quits. I booked a flight to India to rediscover myself spiritually. Around that time, I finally figured out how the internet worked. I was driving crazy amounts of web traffic and making a killer profit. Since I had already booked a flight to India, I decided to take a break. If I made once online, I could do it again. A few months delay won't change much. I could even try working online in India, or so I thought.

If you haven't been to India... you're in for a surprise! The wifi sucks dick there. When most people go to a poor country, they usually get shocked at the poverty, but for me, it was the wifi situation. It shocked me that a country supposedly as "developed" as India had the shittiest wifi I've ever encountered. So no work could be done...

I went backpacking around India and Nepal for 3 months. Met a ton of crazies, hot girls, and the funniest travelers in the world. Disclaimer: I'm a total hippie. I ended up trekking in Nepal during the big F*cking earthquake and took me forever to get back home.

Now that I'm back I'm gonna kick a$$ online and start building my brand. I'm done selling other people's junk. All in all, I grew a lot as a person and in skills. I am a little behind in where I want to be, but I'm gonna go "full power" and get myself to where I want to be.

Will update again in a few months.

Photos on imgur: http://imgur.com/a/HTZx7

 

[firmwear]

LOL, this thread delivers!

Good job on doing what you are doing.

What are the most useful words; Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese?

 

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[Kingmaker]

Epic story man! If you went through all that adversity unscratched you can succeed in building your dream business.

P.S. If you ever find yourself on philosophy kick again check out Stoicism, namely "The Obstacle Is The Way" by Ryan Holiday. It's the ultimate entrepreneur philosophy imo. Here's a little intro article: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practical-guide-for-entrepreneurs/

 

[DurianGray]

Its been 5 months back in the States and I expected my progress to be further along

Since my last post I just focused on my internet marketing skills. Busted a$$ learning media buying promoting shitty app installs in India. Read every single thing I could find online and on some forums a few you guys are prob familiar with.

I would say that it was ok. I had some small successes, a few 4 figure profit days, but they were short lived. I struggled to get something consistently going on. People were ripping my campaigns left and right. I couldn’t trust anyone… my traffic source, my affiliate network, other people copying my shit. It was alright, but its nothing long term.

A lot of ups and a lot of downs.

I even decided to apply for some jobs in SF. I guess I am still debating it. I can’t beat their crazy salaries right out the gate. I mean… a noob software dev makes like 90k starting. My bro just started his job doing that.

I applied for a lot of internet marketing jobs to focus more on the marketing side instead of the technology side (my background). However I really suck at interviews and the stress of working in such a cut throat political environment would really stress me out.

Now I’m down to my last $1000 and am focusing solely on my current project. My weakness has been “shiny obj” syndrome and now need to focus on something.

It is gonna be a drop shipping site, but now with an actual plan. I’m still new to FB so it may get a little dicey. It will be in a niche that is a growing industry. Gonna hit up my old contact and find out what the hottest products are.

 

[DurianGray]

Blueprint:

1. Set up shitty woo commerce site - DONE

• compared to my previous magento store that i spent ages on… this is doesn’t look as nice but F*ck it, its like 80% of the way there and took me 1 hr instead of 2 weeks lol.

2. Facebook Ads for Lead gen:

• Got my old account banned learning the ropes… Spent some time farming accounts.
• gonna spend ~$100 sending to my fan page to warm up account.
  • will do post engagements for virality.
• then gonna try the new Lead Ads, Instagram Ads, offer ad, and clicks to my option LP
• Goal to get CPL ~1.50 ??? reasonable?
• This is a broad product and I will need to come up with different angles for each demo.
• First target will be Kanye West fans.

3. While campaigns running…

• revive my instagram account.
• target reddit for free traffic.
• build custom fb audience
• Connect with other distributors.

4.Email autoresponder sequence

• Write up a 3 day sequence targeted towards the geo.
• Push 3 diff products. 1 affiliate offer, 1 big purchase, 1 med purchase, 1 accessory/upsell in this niche.
• Plan is to come up with a story.
• start with MailCheat(Chimp) then switch to aweber once i get >2000 emails.
• will make this into a newsletter/magazine style email.

4. pray to buddha that my FB account won’t get banned or my Paypal doesn’t get frozen.

Goal is to send out emails after 500 emails collected. Hoping for 10% CR rate with $35 avg profit per conversion. If i break even i am happy.

If anyone has any FB experience please PM me or Skype… Would really appreciate it.

P.S @firmwear for other languages, a simple “hello” always does the trick. and telling a girl “you’re beautiful.” lol

 

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[HairyMonk]

I respect and love the joruney you took man. Would love to talk to you some time. I come and go between here , Vietnam and china. Share some of the experiences you've had.