Building a high barrier to entry business as a 18 Year old Student

[Henry Roe.]

This is the progess thread to the Journey of me developing a healthy and good tasting Soda with protein content.
Currently i want to have it be Vegan, non gmo, no sugar, mostly natural and with around 10 grams of protein per can.

The shit i have to do for this to be real is stupid. I spent hours and all of my allowance on experimenting to get this to taste good and let me tell you, you have not tasted something as disgusting as the things i cooked together in the kitchen.
This is only one of the many things i need to do. The more important thing is to aquire soft proove of my Idea being in demand. Tbh i am scared to do it because it might just turn out as a bad idea but whatever i gotta stop being a pussy and control my emotions.
Aside from this i also need to do the marketing and design of the Creatives and Website.

Next update ill have solid soft proove, a non disgusting prototype (that doesnt have to fulfill all the requirements yet) and a start to the branding.

 

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[BigRomeDawg]

How are you making the prototype? What's your general plan to get to market?

 

[Henry Roe.]

How are you making the prototype? What's your general plan to get to market?

The way im making the prototype is by buying a selection of raw ingredients and then putting them together in an attempt to create something drinkable. For example I buy amino acids to combine into full proteins. Then I dissolve it in Water thats been saturated with Co2 and gradualy add more syrup untill the taste doesnt make me dry heave.

My plan to bring it to the market doesnt really exist right now. I need to learn some more things about how that works in germany.

I therms of marketing I am going to pay influencers to promote the product to get started, once i have the creatives, website and design done.

 

[Henry Roe.]

So Update right now.

I decided to do market research through a squeeze page that offered my target audience a really good guide to writing professional looking/business E-Mails. In exchange they had to give me their E-Mails and answer 6 Questions on their opinion on this Product. Worked wonders so far. In my first day of organic advertising i got 9 visitors and 5 people filled out the form and of those 5 responses 4 were helpful data.

Besides that im decided to drop the lap work in priority for now and focus on market research and branding. Yeah this is spooky because I am backing myself to be able to deliver on the promises I made.

I also learned that to make money you have to spend money. Not in a huge way but paying the 9€ for the basic worpress plan and 10€ for a domain just makes such a huge difference.
All these "Businesses you can start for 0€" videos and talks really made me forget that sometimes in life being cheap just isnt the way.

Because of this i set 200€ aside to use for this project because lets be real, I have no better way of spending it. My parents are telling me to invest into ETFs and i tried to tell them the math is bad. Sadly they think that 100k at age 40 is a unbelivable ammount of money.

Anyways I am really seeing how "easy" it is to build a funnel for infoproducts and then upsell people. I am going to do the unthinkable and sell a course to the people going through the squeeze page when i start the paid ads campaign to cover some of the expenses. If of the 14k impressions i can afford (with 70€ budget like holy shit is this stuff cheap) 1% go on the site and then 100 People go through with the form ill have about 95-90 Emails. With again a 1% conversion on upsells there will be at least one person that buys the course for 24.99€. Its far from profitable but on it just gave me a ~30% discount on the market research. I might even put up the E-Mail guide and course for free here since I genuinly belive its good value and I gotta give something to this community.

P.s. If you know a bit more than me about conversion I'd love to hear how far off my estimates are from what is normal.

 

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[Robdavis]

Could you start by getting a market stall in a market? I'm in the UK and some of our towns have markets (usually weekly) where producers can sell their products on a market stall.
If you could get a market stall, all you would have to do is to make the product, bottle / can it, take it to the market and then sell it all day. You could forget about all the online stuff and you also wouldn't have to worry about getting into shops. Just start off selling small quantities direct to customers. Your marketing would just be smile and a couple of nice signs to decorate the stall. You would get feedback direct from customers if you allowed them to try a small amount before purchase. I think that you could learn a lot this way quite quickly.
This sort of thing (apparently this is a market in Leipzig):

In order to scale, you would have to get your product into shops and get high volume manufacturing etc, but this might be a good way to start out with you manufacturing your product in your kitchen.

EDIT: You'll need some labels for your bottles or cans. That'll be part of your marketing as well.

 

[Henry Roe.]

Could you start by getting a market stall in a market? I'm in the UK and some of our towns have markets (usually weekly) where producers can sell their products on a market stall.
If you could get a market stall, all you would have to do is to make the product, bottle / can it, take it to the market and then sell it all day. You could forget about all the online stuff and you also wouldn't have to worry about getting into shops. Just start off selling small quantities direct to customers. Your marketing would just be smile and a couple of nice signs to decorate the stall. You would get feedback direct from customers if you allowed them to try a small amount before purchase. I think that you could learn a lot this way quite quickly.
This sort of thing (apparently this is a market in Leipzig):

In order to scale, you would have to get your product into shops and get high volume manufacturing etc, but this might be a good way to start out with you manufacturing your product in your kitchen.

Yeah this is a great idea.

Thank you, I'll try my best to get a spot somewhere to set his up. I'll write here how it went .

 

[Henry Roe.]

Small update: I am starting to become a action taker. Made 150€ cleaning windows and probably another 50 next weekend. I just used it to practice marketing through flyers and it's profitable.

I also got a big party coming up that I'm organizing so there should be some more profit. In general I am learning sales and taking action.
The reason I don't solely focus on the business is because it's not really time intensive and moreso waiting time intensive.

Learning sales is currently the single most rewarding thing I've started. I suck but it's just fun to practice.

 

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[Henry Roe.]

Just earned the hardest 30€ of my life. Did window cleaning for a sweet old lady with her small mansion/penthouse. It was 4° outside and windy. I had to stand on top of a shaky ladder to then reach the top of the large glass panels with a extended stick thingy. The sponge didn't fit on it so I had to just use the stick the other way round and press the sponge against the window with it to get it wet. That F*cker fell on my face 3 times and every time I almost fell of the ladder.


Tldr. I need to charge more money for this, I won't keep doing this for 15€ an hour.

 

[Predator]

I might be wrong, this is something which I don't know much about, but don't you need some kind of certification for selling eatables and beverages? Please tell me if it is otherwise.

 

[Henry Roe.]

I might be wrong, this is something which I don't know much about, but don't you need some kind of certification for selling eatables and beverages? Please tell me if it is otherwise.

Yes selling a product like this one requires lots of certification once I'm trying to get it to retail. Law is less strict when selling it privately and through ecom but even then there is need for some level of certification once it reaches any kind of scale.

Yet this is a step 10 problem and I am at step 2 right now. It's just one more thing that makes sure that once I have it on the market, it's going to take a long time untill I have direct competition.

 

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[Andy Black]

So Update right now.

I decided to do market research through a squeeze page that offered my target audience a really good guide to writing professional looking/business E-Mails. In exchange they had to give me their E-Mails and answer 6 Questions on their opinion on this Product. Worked wonders so far. In my first day of organic advertising i got 9 visitors and 5 people filled out the form and of those 5 responses 4 were helpful data.

Besides that im decided to drop the lap work in priority for now and focus on market research and branding. Yeah this is spooky because I am backing myself to be able to deliver on the promises I made.

I also learned that to make money you have to spend money. Not in a huge way but paying the 9€ for the basic worpress plan and 10€ for a domain just makes such a huge difference.
All these "Businesses you can start for 0€" videos and talks really made me forget that sometimes in life being cheap just isnt the way.

Because of this i set 200€ aside to use for this project because lets be real, I have no better way of spending it. My parents are telling me to invest into ETFs and i tried to tell them the math is bad. Sadly they think that 100k at age 40 is a unbelivable ammount of money.

Anyways I am really seeing how "easy" it is to build a funnel for infoproducts and then upsell people. I am going to do the unthinkable and sell a course to the people going through the squeeze page when i start the paid ads campaign to cover some of the expenses. If of the 14k impressions i can afford (with 70€ budget like holy shit is this stuff cheap) 1% go on the site and then 100 People go through with the form ill have about 95-90 Emails. With again a 1% conversion on upsells there will be at least one person that buys the course for 24.99€. Its far from profitable but on it just gave me a ~30% discount on the market research. I might even put up the E-Mail guide and course for free here since I genuinly belive its good value and I gotta give something to this community.

P.s. If you know a bit more than me about conversion I'd love to hear how far off my estimates are from what is normal.

How're the ads going?

 

[Henry Roe.]

How're the ads going?

Got hit with the "card not aproved"
Today I turned 18 tho so now my priority is to get a real working card. My current one is like a child card that doesn't support recurring payments and the ad service didn't like that.

I still have the hunch that I'm going to get hit with some hard miscalculations.

 

[Andy Black]

Got hit with the "card not aproved"
Today I turned 18 tho so now my priority is to get a real working card. My current one is like a child card that doesn't support recurring payments and the ad service didn't like that.

I still have the hunch that I'm going to get hit with some hard miscalculations.

Keep spend low while you learn.

 

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[Funky Monkey]

Did a quick google search to see if its already done and saw this site Drink Fizzique

Maybe you can reverse engineer some aspects like their recipe & traffic sources (did a quick look at similar web but it said it didn't have enough data)?

Best of luck! I would love to find these at a gas station or something.

 

[Robdavis]

Today I turned 18 tho

Happy birthday. Hope you had a good one...