IceCreamKid
With Great Power Comes Great Electricity Bill
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
There are many ways to undress your mistress. Just gotta get the creative juices flowing.The trick is to be that one-in-a-thousand whose 1000 hours of work are worth $3,000,000 and not $15,000. Otherwise, you need to find some way to mass produce your lower-value creations.
My very first successful biz was in the furniture niche. I spoke about it for my forum meetup presentation in Texas back in 2014. Rustic farmhouse style furniture was(and still is) very trendy at the time, but was outrageously expensive in retail stores. A dining table from Restoration Hardware would easily run for $2k, but cost only a few hundred dollars in materials to build.
Here's the neat thing about farmhouse furniture....PEOPLE LIKE THE IMPERFECTIONS. They don't want the perfect look that results from machine-made furniture. You know how people buy jeans with holes in them for $300 at Nordstrom? It's the exact same idea. People pay a premium for furniture that looks messed up and worn. We did all sorts of weird stuff to make the furniture look crappy...poured vinegar on the finish, hit it in random places with hammers and crowbars, put a hot iron to the wood to simulate burn marks...
Jump on YouTube and start searching for farmhouse table tutorials. Check out Ana White's site too. She has some really good tutorials made specifically for newbies. It's easier than most think.
The biz started out as B2C then eventually morphed into a B2B thing after I realized that there was a lot more profit and less hassles when dealing with businesses. The big boost came when I teamed up with a girl who was an interior designer for startups throughout the Bay Area and she funneled the majority of her clients to me. She found me by sheer luck when I was selling some furniture on Craigslist. As things scaled, I hired college students to do the building then later started hiring guys from a local non-profit that would connect employers with people looking for work.
Just jump in and build something. I can promise you one thing: you will get a ton of fastlane ideas from being in the trenches of the furniture building process. I got A TON of fastlane ideas from being in the trenches for that biz. There's no way that the ideas would have magically came to me if I was just sitting in my room trying to brainstorm.
Just jump in and try not to plan too much. Enjoy the process. Be present to the moment.
A lot of the newbies will spend months or even years devising the perfect plan. Let's spend forever creating the smoothest plan with the least resistance and THEN we can finally begin our journey to the DeMarco land of Lambos.
I don't care how much you plan and strategize because once you finally start, random things that you never expected WILL pop up. And those random things will pop up on a damn near weekly basis. That's the entrepreneur life. Any guru who tells you otherwise is a fraud.