Hey, all long time lurker, my name is Gar and I'm 30, from Dublin, Ireland. Some of the below is a repost form my intro thread.
I'm a mechanical engineer by trade in my slow lane job. I suppose my entrepreneurial journey all began when I read the 4 hour work week, pretty sure since reading it I’ve worked way more than the average person, not 4 hours, but it helped to contextualize some thoughts that I had in my head about being an employee. I remember thinking that I could be one of the most valuable people in that company, but that as an employee there's always going to be a ceiling, I can't ask for a 1000% pay raise, I can help save the company a fortune with the way something is designed (and have done numerous times) but none of those savings will ever go into my pocket. With this in mind, I started looking at some ideas.
The first idea I looked into was drop shipping, after looking around at what to sell I eventually settled on vinyl record players (not really sure why thinking back on it). I got to work and found a supplier and got building my site. Once the site was built I quickly realised that having a website is the easy part, it's actually getting traffic to it that's hard. Unsure what to do from here I settled on running Facebook ads. The ad campaign wasn't really much of a success but considering I hadn't really much of a clue what I was doing I basically recouped the cost of running it and made a couple of sales. I distinctly remember I was on a weekend away with some friends in Poland and getting a notification that I made a sale while doing nothing. This helped prove to myself it’s possible to make money on the internet but I didn't think the margin was there on the record players.
After taking a couple of weeks away I came across an eBook about running Instagram accounts and then selling t-shirts with them so decided to give it a go. I set to work setting up 4 different niche accounts and posted a couple of pictures to them each day. I also found a bot that could automate liking and following other accounts for you to help grow them. After a few weeks and getting into a couple thousand followers on each account I started posting some t-shirts on them with a link to buy. After a few sales came in I decided to scale this up and went about creating a network of over 150 accounts and set them all up on autopilot. Over the course of about a year and a half this made a bit north of $50,000 with very little effort just occasional maintenance every so often.
Around the same time a guy joined my team in my slowlane job and we soon found out that we had similar ideas and began discussing potential business ideas. I showed him my whole Instagram setup and we decided that since I had managed to grow my Instagram accounts to a cumulative total of about 7 million followers people would probably pay for the same service to grow their own personal accounts. From this we decided to set up an Instagram Management Service. We also recruited one of his friends from college and set to work. Between the three of us we managed to grow the service to over 300 clients at it peak paying anywhere from $50 to $75 per month with a total income of about $28000/month.
The problem however is Instagram really cracked down on botting, and as many of you can probably guess this violates MJ’s control aspect the CENTs framework so we always knew this was a possibility. With this in mind I started looking into other more sustainable avenues and ended up signing up to @Fox Web School last year which has been a great help for me so far. I've learned a tonne about sales and have gotten lots of value out of it. Anyway, I've worked on a good few websites now and from talking to some business owners I've decided to try and create a subscription-based website agency as opposed to the more traditional once-off payment approach.
The idea behind this is that first of all reoccurring revenue is awesome and I personally much prefer having a better idea of what revenue is going to be coming in each month then wondering if certain deals are going to close or not and if it'll be a $0 month or not. Another reason is that I like the process of business and helping business owners. From a lot of the business owners I've talked to their businesses could really have benefited from a well-structured website but they didn't necessarily have the budget to be able to create one. By offering a subscription-based website, at an affordable price I'm hoping to be able to target smaller service type businesses and get them hooked up with a website that really benefits their business and gives them a good ROI. Basically they get the website designed at a super low cost and its paid off over 12 months (min contract length), after that, the plan is they'll be extremely satisfied with the service, value provided, and ROI from their site that they'll stay signed up.
The main idea is that initially (i.e. until I scale up and have a team member) I will be the main point of contact for the client for anything to do with their website. I'll provide hosting, the domain, email accounts, maintenance, security updates, etc. so they'll never need to worry about anything going wrong, all they need to do is call me and I'll fix their problems. I dont have everything figured out yet but I'll iterate and figure stuff out as I go. Basically I want to sell peace of mind to them.
I want to use this thread for accountability and also to document each step I take along the way, my thoughts etc. and plan to make weekly updates every Sunday. Any questions just stick them up and I'll try answer them.
I'm a mechanical engineer by trade in my slow lane job. I suppose my entrepreneurial journey all began when I read the 4 hour work week, pretty sure since reading it I’ve worked way more than the average person, not 4 hours, but it helped to contextualize some thoughts that I had in my head about being an employee. I remember thinking that I could be one of the most valuable people in that company, but that as an employee there's always going to be a ceiling, I can't ask for a 1000% pay raise, I can help save the company a fortune with the way something is designed (and have done numerous times) but none of those savings will ever go into my pocket. With this in mind, I started looking at some ideas.
The first idea I looked into was drop shipping, after looking around at what to sell I eventually settled on vinyl record players (not really sure why thinking back on it). I got to work and found a supplier and got building my site. Once the site was built I quickly realised that having a website is the easy part, it's actually getting traffic to it that's hard. Unsure what to do from here I settled on running Facebook ads. The ad campaign wasn't really much of a success but considering I hadn't really much of a clue what I was doing I basically recouped the cost of running it and made a couple of sales. I distinctly remember I was on a weekend away with some friends in Poland and getting a notification that I made a sale while doing nothing. This helped prove to myself it’s possible to make money on the internet but I didn't think the margin was there on the record players.
After taking a couple of weeks away I came across an eBook about running Instagram accounts and then selling t-shirts with them so decided to give it a go. I set to work setting up 4 different niche accounts and posted a couple of pictures to them each day. I also found a bot that could automate liking and following other accounts for you to help grow them. After a few weeks and getting into a couple thousand followers on each account I started posting some t-shirts on them with a link to buy. After a few sales came in I decided to scale this up and went about creating a network of over 150 accounts and set them all up on autopilot. Over the course of about a year and a half this made a bit north of $50,000 with very little effort just occasional maintenance every so often.
Around the same time a guy joined my team in my slowlane job and we soon found out that we had similar ideas and began discussing potential business ideas. I showed him my whole Instagram setup and we decided that since I had managed to grow my Instagram accounts to a cumulative total of about 7 million followers people would probably pay for the same service to grow their own personal accounts. From this we decided to set up an Instagram Management Service. We also recruited one of his friends from college and set to work. Between the three of us we managed to grow the service to over 300 clients at it peak paying anywhere from $50 to $75 per month with a total income of about $28000/month.
The problem however is Instagram really cracked down on botting, and as many of you can probably guess this violates MJ’s control aspect the CENTs framework so we always knew this was a possibility. With this in mind I started looking into other more sustainable avenues and ended up signing up to @Fox Web School last year which has been a great help for me so far. I've learned a tonne about sales and have gotten lots of value out of it. Anyway, I've worked on a good few websites now and from talking to some business owners I've decided to try and create a subscription-based website agency as opposed to the more traditional once-off payment approach.
The idea behind this is that first of all reoccurring revenue is awesome and I personally much prefer having a better idea of what revenue is going to be coming in each month then wondering if certain deals are going to close or not and if it'll be a $0 month or not. Another reason is that I like the process of business and helping business owners. From a lot of the business owners I've talked to their businesses could really have benefited from a well-structured website but they didn't necessarily have the budget to be able to create one. By offering a subscription-based website, at an affordable price I'm hoping to be able to target smaller service type businesses and get them hooked up with a website that really benefits their business and gives them a good ROI. Basically they get the website designed at a super low cost and its paid off over 12 months (min contract length), after that, the plan is they'll be extremely satisfied with the service, value provided, and ROI from their site that they'll stay signed up.
The main idea is that initially (i.e. until I scale up and have a team member) I will be the main point of contact for the client for anything to do with their website. I'll provide hosting, the domain, email accounts, maintenance, security updates, etc. so they'll never need to worry about anything going wrong, all they need to do is call me and I'll fix their problems. I dont have everything figured out yet but I'll iterate and figure stuff out as I go. Basically I want to sell peace of mind to them.
I want to use this thread for accountability and also to document each step I take along the way, my thoughts etc. and plan to make weekly updates every Sunday. Any questions just stick them up and I'll try answer them.
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