Eskil
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From a long term perspective, I feel like I almost need to develop a product and manufacture/build (self or outsourced) it to be successful. Wanted to see what peoples thoughts were. I know people make money by marketing/reselling things from alibaba, selling their services etc but I hardly see such businesses on shark tank or raising venture capital.
I highlighted the most important words right there. Long term.
Flipping stuff on Amazon from Alibaba (or dropshipping through Shopify) can be good short term, to learn the ropes of sourcing, listing, learning about selling, build up some cash, etc. But as @Luk391 pointed out - for long term - you're gonna want much more CONTROL. And that means owning your own stuff.
That could mean;
1) coming up with a product / idea that you could own the intellectual patent for and license out for royalties (Easiest, but with less earnings potential than 2 and 3)
2) taking an existing product and differentiating it enough to stand on its own (Moderate difficulty, with moderate to high potential)
3) creating and developing a new product from scratch (Hard difficulty, but with moderate to massive potential)
For 2 and 3, you should be focused heavily on branding, and building a good productocracy (see MJ's book "Unscripted ")
Creating and developing a product can be done a couple of different ways;
- after initial design and prototyping, you can outsource the actual production/manufacturing to a contract manufacturer (see my progress thread as an example)
or
- take on your own production for even more control (see @AllenCrawley 's progress thread here as an example)