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- Jun 6, 2013
- 347
- 866
- 36
Hey guys,
I've been around the forum a while now, and generally my projects are weird and wonderful. They're the kind of ideas that get people over-excited, and seem like a blast to work on, like our last project (all of which is in the INSIDERS Section, if you're not in there, get in there!). Well, unfortunately this style of project has an inherit high-risk of failure. This became obvious during my 1-on-1 call with the legendary @JackEdwards last week.
My business partner is @bane, and we're ready to finally hit the Fastlane!
Our Idea
Our idea is simple. We found an old industry, basically, just tradespeople in a particular category, most of which buy all of their day-to-day items from their local trade store. We're now planning to bypass retail, and sell direct to these businesses at a discounted rate. We're also aiming to take the best features of our major competitors, and combine them into one product. We'll make over $200 profit with every one sold from what we can tell, but it will all depend on volume .etc.
Our Execution
After tracking down suppliers, and finding out we can easily get our hands on this product (just not confirmed on quality yet, but we'll get to that), we decided we had to talk to some businesses, while trying to find out the following information:
We started calling on Monday, and we've called 23 people in this industry so far. Our original plan was to just target small towns, but we found that we can actually sell to guys in major cities, so it's a much bigger market than we realized!
I've got plenty of experience with cold-calling, Bane got his first chance to hit the phones though, and totally killed it. Our script started off like this:
"Hey mate, my name is Jared, I'd love a minute of your time just to ask you a few questions, *I'm not trying to sell you anything*, have you got a minute?" Then firing away.
Just some notes for anyone doing this. You say "I'm not trying to sell you anything" because they are waiting for a reason to hang-up if you are. This cuts through that.
You also need to quickly establish that this is NOT a customer call, they will get excited that it's a new customer, then when you take that away from them, they'll just want to get off the phone as they've been let down.
Overall, the majority were happy to talk to us. I ended up getting creative at the end and have a guy that would have bought 10 off us immediately. As soon as we have stock, he'll buy. We had 2 other calls go the same, they'll probably buy immediately, plenty of others are very likely to convert as soon as we have the item in stock.
The Next Steps
After such a successful start, we have no doubt we can sell this product. So now the issue is making sure we have great quality. I've dealt with China before, and it can be hard to get decent quality.
Does anyone have any tips for this? We need a very high quality, and for them to honor any warranty they give. We'll be asking for references in English speaking countries so we can follow them up, and double check the quality, we'll also do independent testing, but can anyone think of any other tips for ensuring we have great quality?
Anyway, thanks for reading guys! A very special thank you to Jack, he's made this all possible. Our focus was definitely in the wrong direction, there are far easier ways to make a million dollars than to invent the next Facebook, we had just never thought about it the right way.
We confidently concluded that the dudes are not loyal to the trade store or the current brands, they will switch to us for the right price even if it means having to hold some in stock (since we won't have a physical store for them)
I've been around the forum a while now, and generally my projects are weird and wonderful. They're the kind of ideas that get people over-excited, and seem like a blast to work on, like our last project (all of which is in the INSIDERS Section, if you're not in there, get in there!). Well, unfortunately this style of project has an inherit high-risk of failure. This became obvious during my 1-on-1 call with the legendary @JackEdwards last week.
My business partner is @bane, and we're ready to finally hit the Fastlane!
Our Idea
Our idea is simple. We found an old industry, basically, just tradespeople in a particular category, most of which buy all of their day-to-day items from their local trade store. We're now planning to bypass retail, and sell direct to these businesses at a discounted rate. We're also aiming to take the best features of our major competitors, and combine them into one product. We'll make over $200 profit with every one sold from what we can tell, but it will all depend on volume .etc.
Our Execution
After tracking down suppliers, and finding out we can easily get our hands on this product (just not confirmed on quality yet, but we'll get to that), we decided we had to talk to some businesses, while trying to find out the following information:
- How many do they buy per month
- What do they pay
- The exact type they use most often
- Where they buy from
- Payment terms, warranty, anything else we could get out of them.
We started calling on Monday, and we've called 23 people in this industry so far. Our original plan was to just target small towns, but we found that we can actually sell to guys in major cities, so it's a much bigger market than we realized!
I've got plenty of experience with cold-calling, Bane got his first chance to hit the phones though, and totally killed it. Our script started off like this:
"Hey mate, my name is Jared, I'd love a minute of your time just to ask you a few questions, *I'm not trying to sell you anything*, have you got a minute?" Then firing away.
Just some notes for anyone doing this. You say "I'm not trying to sell you anything" because they are waiting for a reason to hang-up if you are. This cuts through that.
You also need to quickly establish that this is NOT a customer call, they will get excited that it's a new customer, then when you take that away from them, they'll just want to get off the phone as they've been let down.
Overall, the majority were happy to talk to us. I ended up getting creative at the end and have a guy that would have bought 10 off us immediately. As soon as we have stock, he'll buy. We had 2 other calls go the same, they'll probably buy immediately, plenty of others are very likely to convert as soon as we have the item in stock.
The Next Steps
After such a successful start, we have no doubt we can sell this product. So now the issue is making sure we have great quality. I've dealt with China before, and it can be hard to get decent quality.
Does anyone have any tips for this? We need a very high quality, and for them to honor any warranty they give. We'll be asking for references in English speaking countries so we can follow them up, and double check the quality, we'll also do independent testing, but can anyone think of any other tips for ensuring we have great quality?
Anyway, thanks for reading guys! A very special thank you to Jack, he's made this all possible. Our focus was definitely in the wrong direction, there are far easier ways to make a million dollars than to invent the next Facebook, we had just never thought about it the right way.
We confidently concluded that the dudes are not loyal to the trade store or the current brands, they will switch to us for the right price even if it means having to hold some in stock (since we won't have a physical store for them)
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