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Deaf & Daft - Part 2

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

jpanarra

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Hey all, JP here!

It's been some time since I've posted here in the FLF. I've lurked around on my phone and such. Since there was a significant time gap between my previous post and this one I figured it was a good time to start up a new progress thread. Now, If there's one thing I've learned on my journey so far, the more I do, the more I realize that I really have no clue with what I'm doing.

Its been almost 2 years of being on this forum. I was reading through the first few posts I've made, even if I didn't really feel like I've made massive progress I've seen the massive improvement in mindset and taking action when it comes to my behavior. Now I will not say that there hasn't been any ups or downs but the reality is when you start working instead of dreaming it feels much more valid and possible that you can achieve your goals.

I was never really clear on my goals in my previous thread, so this being a reset I want to establish a feasible Goal that I will achieve before next September.

Goal - Generate $50,000 income for next September.

Now to update on my current/previous ventures aka my baseline -

Web Development- Still going strong! I'm projected to make maybe 18K in website development and design. This is a significant improvement compared to last year. It hasn't replaced my current job income just yet but It's on track to do so by the next year or 2. Also, my development skills have improved significantly and I have expanded to different types of businesses and services such as e-commerce and web marketing. Still, to this day, my biggest struggle with this is web sales due to cold calling barriers.

Google Adwords & Facebook Ads - I started going down this route this year. There are a number of courses on this forum and on Udemy to learn how to do online Ads. This is a way that you can earn MRR(Monthly Recurring Revenue) with great margins. I currently have 2 recurring customers for Google AdWords affiliated with their websites. This is a feasible model to expand and explore upon, it's much easier to sell when you bundle it with a website sale and it offers immediate results meaning happier clients over the long run.

Electroplating - This one was frustrating and lost some cash on this, margins might be incredible but I was getting a small amount of attention and not a lot of people really search for gold/copper plating services. I've gotten a good amount requests for automotive parts chromed, but chrome requires a separate facility and permits from the government due to its hazardous nature. Due to the low volume, I decided to wrap up shop on this. This is still my current job and I have a career in this path. In the long term, I'll probably be able to apply this towards maybe importing products coming out of China that are electroplated.

E-commerce - To me, This has the most time-to-income potential. My journey down this road started with an affiliate Amazon web store. It performed poorly because of a number of reasons, it was a low hanging fruit and I went for a very high priced item ($3,000 - $5,000 range).

However, It exposed me to building e-commerce web stores. There was a time gap between my failure and my next opportunity, someone on this forum offered me an opportunity to improve upon a POD (print on demand) store which I'm redesigning at the moment and hope to go live before the end of this month.

This opened up a door of knowledge for me and my family, my father was a well-known artist, tattooist, and biker in his own niche community and he passed in an unfortunate accident 3 years ago. My family and I have always talked about turning his stuff into merchandise to generate revenue for ourselves and to keep his art and sprit alive. So I was able to plugin POD service for the website I've designed awhile ago and shelved because I thought we needed inventory to start, but It went live just in time before a major event his artwork was featured at in Brooklyn and generated almost 300$ in revenue over the weekend. You can check out the store here

www.richiepan.com

Another thing was I've been working on a dropshipping store for some time now and is 100% functional at the time being, I'm still learning on how to do ads for products and promotion opportunities for this. Again, this is a generic camping dropship store, the purpose of this store is to hopefully break even from the marketing spending. I'm hoping to use this as a Guinea pig to learn how to write facebook/google ads to bring traffic and convert.

Check it out here,

www.carrasupply.com


I don’t plan on stopping this train any time soon, I've noticed in the past when I've improved the most was when I was documenting my activities on here because of the incredible community and feedback that goes on around here. Also, there is some sense of responsibility when you share your progress and this will help me on my journey. I hope it helps you as well.
 
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Merging Left

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How are you able to make cold calls? Forgive me ignorance, I just don't know about what type of accessibility tools there are for deaf people.

In a similar vein, can you speak and read lips, or how do you talk to people at the different events/meet-ups you go to?

Your dropship camping site seems to be loading really slowly - might want to look into it with your host.
Pingdom Tools

Are you importing/dropshipping from Aliexpress or another Chinese source? Have you looked into the tariffs and how that might impact your margins?
 

jpanarra

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How are you able to make cold calls? Forgive me ignorance, I just don't know about what type of accessibility tools there are for deaf people.

In a similar vein, can you speak and read lips, or how do you talk to people at the different events/meet-ups you go to?

Your dropship camping site seems to be loading really slowly - might want to look into it with your host.
Pingdom Tools

Are you importing/dropshipping from Aliexpress or another Chinese source? Have you looked into the tariffs and how that might impact your margins?

I use a video relay interpreting service, I've requested a number from a VRS and I use that to make calls. How the system works is there is a video chat kinda like facetime/skype between myself and sign language interpreter on the phone. So it becomes sort of a 3-way conversation which you can imagine what kind of damper that puts on calling people. It doesn't help that the VRS has beeps, whistles, and robots like an automated service.

I do attend meetups in my area and I can manage 1 on 1 lipreading and conversation but i can't sustain it for long. No matter how good they are at lipreading people can say they are, it is very mentally exhausting work and especially when you're meeting new people face to face.

As for the camping dropship, I'm optimizing for SEO right now and going down the checklist and images are the big damper on the speed, so I'm working on that for the time being. I'm using google Pagespeed insights, I've gotten better feedback from that over Pingdom myself. Thanks for the insights! Also, yeah the suppliers are found over Aliexpress and I'm focused on the e-packets only. Tariffs will reflect itself within the price rather than after it's arrived here I've noticed.
 

Merging Left

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How cool would it be if there was some technology where you could type out a reply, and then the new Google Assistant could read it to the other end of the phone in a natural way, then it would transcribe the other end's response... rinse and repeat. Hmm... Or just automating that Google Assistant to make natural sounding cold calls.

On your web design page in your sig, it looks like your brothers are helping you out with the business. Do you have them helping make calls, or are you handling most of that yourself still?
 
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jpanarra

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How cool would it be if there was some technology where you could type out a reply, and then the new Google Assistant could read it to the other end of the phone in a natural way, then it would transcribe the other end's response... rinse and repeat. Hmm... Or just automating that Google Assistant to make natural sounding cold calls.

On your web design page in your sig, it looks like your brothers are helping you out with the business. Do you have them helping make calls, or are you handling most of that yourself still?


Haha, They're deaf too. I have been keeping a close eye on the google assistant thing. Was wondering how feasible it would be to use that as a proper sales tool.
 

jpanarra

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Hey guys, JP here.

Web Design is doing ok, I'm at the end of my pipeline. I did this to myself and I recognize that. Never stop prospecting and reaching out to get new leads and warm them up even if they might be months out. Because of this, I realized that I might be spreading myself too thin and actually start looking into a new hire for sales that will require commission only. I don't really have enough capital to put forth for a small stipend, but I can afford the resources such as a Chromebook laptop if needed so I was thinking about offering that as an incentive on top of their 5th sale or something. (open to feedback on this logic)

Doing Ads so that is generating monthly revenue, not crazy high but still doing good. I'm not charging my clients much because I'm still new at this. I know most agencies charge 500$ + where my services don't even come close to that.

E-commmerce is doing great, so far we've gotten 260 dollars in profit. I've been updating a facebook ads thread regarding this. I haven't seen a return off the ads just yet but I've taken it off for a week to see where the baseline settles at and then I'm hoping to start another ad with a coupon built in and hopefully will give a big boost of traffic and conversions.

I will update my facebook thread and will have another thread about starting up a sales team
 

jpanarra

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Hey All JP here

I was booked from Thursday to yesterday.. Was a groomsman at a wedding for one of my best friends so now playtime is over and It's time to turn up the heat.

I'm hoping to make this into a weekly goals and achievements thread. I will be posting my goals on Mondays, and updating what I've done on Fridays.

Goal - Generate $50,000 income for next September.
  • Monthly Goal - 4k a week
    • How this will be achieved, 1-2 website sold monthly.

The fact is time is of the essence. I don't have the liberty of pushing sales to get one website sale per month. I will need to get a commission based employee to cover this side of the business. I can make it into a systematic process and it can be done less than 4-6 hours every day.


What will be done this week
  1. Will be sharing the job opening regarding sales commissions on social media. Hoping to find some people to train to be a working salesperson for my web business
  2. Going to put up a 50$ facebook ad for one of my e-commerce websites and get a healthy case study prior to changing a variable.
  3. Getting my youtube channel up and running again. I already wrote down a long list of topics I can talk about on my trip. So will be posting my first video after a while this week!
 
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jpanarra

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My e-commerce store is currently up for auction on flippa.com. I haven't done any traffic optimization for it, i just built it and it pretty much sat on the shelf and its a great website design and has a number of dropshipping products on it. I put it up for 500$ and I'm curious to see if anybody bites.

If nobody does, i'll start doing some SEM for cheap and low traffic keywords to get some life in it and put it back up for auction.

Now for sales, I have a bit more detail in my sales team building in the INSIDERS, but I have 1 person that's in contact and all of the others are either on and off and don't seem to understand sales and how commission works. I'm still posting on facebook groups and such.


HOWEVER, Yesterday I got banned from sending pages messages for some time now. I usually try to keep it under 10 messages a day so it floats under facebook's spam radar. So that’s the limitation to that one. Linked in sucks but at least I don't get banned on there.

I've worked on trying to make my business laser focused on a certain niche.

I'm going to go after manufacturers and b2b businesses which usually carry a lot of cash and tend to not pay attention to their online presence. My approach for this is to show them competitors or other companies similar to them but aren't direct competitors and explain to them why they have a good website and what problems can be solved.

My main website will be worked on to reflect 'b2b' such as industrial cleaners or industrial flooring and manufacturers pages and position myself on search ads and SEO to target that audience.
 

jpanarra

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Hey guys!

I'm going to do the Youtube thing... Video updates on my progress as well! Please let me know about the audio.. I did the voice over myself and audio editing is pretty challenging when you can't hear!

 

Merging Left

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Were you born deaf? If so, how did you learn how to pronounce words correctly?

I liked the video. Audio level seemed fine (i.e. it wasn't too loud). It was a bit difficult to understand some of your pronunciation, but I think I got about 95% of it. Maybe include subtitles going forward.

It was cool to hear about your different ventures and plans for going forward. I want to see what you do with your dad's art work in particular, because it's very personal to you.
 
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jpanarra

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Jan 9, 2014
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Were you born deaf? If so, how did you learn how to pronounce words correctly?

I liked the video. Audio level seemed fine (i.e. it wasn't too loud). It was a bit difficult to understand some of your pronunciation, but I think I got about 95% of it. Maybe include subtitles going forward.

It was cool to hear about your different ventures and plans for going forward. I want to see what you do with your dad's art work in particular, because it's very personal to you.

Yeah I was born deaf, The reason why I think I know how to speak is mainly due to my personality and environment. I was very engaged with people and tried to communicate with them. I was always open to correction and feedback and it helped me to grow my voice.

Subtitles will be up tonight, right now the auto transcribe is up. I'm planning on editing that to match what I'm saying.
 

jpanarra

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Hey all, JP here

Been awhile since I’ve posted. I took it easy last week on my posting and videos to unwind a bit and spend time with the kids.

I got my first sale of the year last week on monday. Had to drive 2 hours to get it and he low balled me a bit for 500$ to get the website but he agreed to the $150/mo maintenance plan. Which over 10 months would be a 2k sale.

I’m definitely switching over to the MRR perspective because I’ll be a lot more willing to help out my clients if something goes wrong with their website 3-4 months down and trying to negotiate the price to repair something that takes me 20 minutes.

Also,. if i get 1 sale per month with that price point, by this time next year I’ll be making 1200$/mo on an almost passive income which can be put towards an VA to take care of the smaller stuff and scheduling.
 

jpanarra

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Hey all, JP here!

Time for an update,

Tax return was a nice surprise for me even if it was a bit less than last year, I'm about to wipe off one of my car loans so that’s an extra 400$/mo for my cashflow!

Cut the cord from comcast and switched over to a local fiber company for 1 gb internet, another $70/mo saved.

And cut down on my phone plan and switched providers saving me another $100/mo.

Cancelled a number of subscriptions on my credit cards that I wasn't even paying attention to, which will save me close to 90$/mo

Web Design-

Things are taking traction for me. I have a number of prospects lined up for march-April and they're in the 4 figure range so that’s a good forecast if I can bring them all to a close. As for January I got 2 sales and both of them are going to be contributing to my MRR so that’s great news.

Still pushing for clients on social media, I'm starting to think of different strategies to bring in more clients with sales people. All of my sales people have gone dark so Its back down to just me… still pushing hard. I will soon not 'work' at a 'job' but rather going fastlane full time.

Private Label -

Again, this product is on the inside if you want to keep up with it. I received my wholesale order and will start packaging them soon. I still haven't settled on a legit brand design. I plan on to build up some social media impact and shooting for my first 10 clients.

My e-com store will be stupid simple and only have 1 sku for the time being to see if I can get legit feedback and build off of it.

My Garage Factory -

I have a 3d printer, which have been put to work to create a CNC machine. The specs are on this website Specifications | V1 Engineering


I'm wondering if it's possible to start with a simple $300 dollar 3d printer to create this cnc which only cost me 400$ to date. (700$ for two creating machines is a bargain if you ask me)


If the machine carves nicely, or should I say - I carve wood using the machine nicely and I'll be able to make simple furniture to put on Facebook marketplace or esty and see if I can make some side revenue that way. (putting the kids to work as well, child labor laws don’t apply in my household!!)


50856856_10158315289913902_8790148289254129664_n.jpg
 
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jpanarra

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Jan 9, 2014
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Indianapolis, Indiana
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