entrepreneur woken up again.

[olli_23]

Hi everyone,

I`m glad and very excited to become a member of this community as I`m 30% into reading Unscripted and I also read TMF about 6 years ago.
Being end of 30's and living a "comfortable" lifestyle in a profession that pays above average (it was my dream to do this profession when I was 16 yrs old) and having had an entrepreneurial project before (see below) but I`m also starting to realize that :

- I will have to keep doing that job until I retire, stuck in the rat race.
- I`m not that excited about it anymore. Away from home a lot and working at night at times.
- Salaries and working conditions have been going downhill in the last 15 years or so that I`m doing this. (we're easily replaced, from one day to another)
- it's keeping me from doing more interesting things with my time, stuck in the comfort zone.

After I became 30 years old, I started to think: well, if I want do to other things with my life: now is the time!

I started looking into ways I could build a business online. The advantage I had was that I had loads of time off being "on call" for my job, and I was in a country far away from friends and family. That gave me a lot of time to work on myself as well as starting an online business.

I ended up being sold on the idea of selling on Amazon. At that time I was using a phone holder that clipped onto the air vent of the car and really liked it. Someone in my family had those in stock in bulk so I thought, why not see if I can sell it. Long story short, someone on Facebook recommended to put this gadget on Amazon, just to see what would be a good price point. That's what I did and one day I went to the post office with a box of 20 of those phone holders to send off that an Amazon FBA warehouse. In the next few days they started to sell and that was pretty exciting to me. I had absolutely zero business experience and this proved to me there was a possibility. (I should have read about Job Proxies at that point... but then, I might have never gotten started on this journey !!)

After ordering many samples on Alibaba I found a great new model of a phone holder that wasn't that popular yet and not yet showing on the first few pages of Amazon. I tested it and it worked great. I created my own brand (basically coming up with a name, logo and design for packaging) and then made a first order of 200 pieces. (there were some roadblocks on the way but luckily I kept going and pushed through to launching). I made sure the listing was great, I had video reviews, review follow-ups and launches with discount codes. My technique worked as it slowly but steadily climbed up to being a #1 ranked product for "phone holder".

Before I knew it, I was making bigger orders from my supplier in China and sales were really high. I had all the inventory arrive at my father's house. (I was abroad most of the time) He then send it off in bulk to the Amazon warehouses and all the rest was dealt with online.
This product kept growing as I expanded into other countries (Europe), reaching #1 rank in those countries too.
I was absolutely amazed at how quickly this grew. I sold about 400 pieces a day via Amazon FBA and the best year the business did 1.4 Million EUR in revenue. (profit of about 25% roughly). I was making more here than in my main job.

At the same time I also realized that this was dangerous territory. Especially after one day where I found I had a notification in Amazon seller central: "Your account has been suspended". No more sales coming in and the 40k EUR that was still with Amazon at that time (not yet transferred to my bank account) was frozen. Turned out that some other Chinese sellers (nothing against Chinese btw!) repeatedly reported some of my product pictures for some obscure reason, and that triggered an automatic account suspension. Next thing I had to write a whole plan on "how to avoid this in the future" etc. etc. to make some employee in charge of this at Amazon happy. I was devastating, I didn't hear back from them for weeks. I was on the phone daily, trying to get someone on the line that could help me. Nothing worked. The only thing I could do was to keep sending emails and keep trying until someone could do something. Finally the situation was resolved after about a month and we started selling again. Reason I`m giving this much info on it is, after reading the chapter in "Unscripted " about job proxies, it thought: MJ is absolutely right on this one. I lived through it. It's a dangerous place to build a business from. 95% from the revenue came from Amazon. The rest from the webstore and some B2B.

Trying to cut this short again, after about 3 years of running this "business" (with help of a VA who managed all the daily operations and after writing out exact procedures for everything that happened in the business) the margins were getting smaller and smaller. Other sellers with the same product started catching up to me and I started to lose the #1 rank. I also tried launching other products but none of them were as successful as the first home-run product. I finally decided to stop the operations as it wasn't worth my time anymore, plus I got pretty frustrated as I had the feeling I tried every possible way to get sales going again but none of them moved the needle that much. I managed to make a very decent profit over those years and decided to take the profit and focus on other things.

That was 4 years ago and in the mean time I focussed on learning to code. It's something I was always intrigued about and I wanted to follow my interests here. I learned a lot and it's been fun. Started out with CS50 which I can highly recommend for anyone interested in starting to learn. I then continued with distance learning "nano-degrees" at a local university in Java and Computer Systems, taking 1 year each including exams etc. I was very motivated and also proud to pass the exams etc. More recently I jumped into Machine Learning (deep learning algorithms) and have been studying that for the last 3-4 months.
As much as I enjoy coding, I also know that I don't want to be a "code monkey" sitting behind a computer all day long and especially not building other people's dreams and projects. To be honest I though at several stages that I should pursue that but I never felt happy with that thought. That's not my dream. That was a story I told myself. Deep down I knew that after a few years of doing that , the same thing would happen here that happened with my actual main profession: you start to slowly dislike it more and more because now it's forced on me, I`m building things that other people want, not what I want to build etc.

So, to conclude all of this. (apologies if this post is too long, that wasn't my intention. But it could be useful for some people to read the details a bit more): Here I am, I felt something was missing, I didn't know what. I did feel for the last few months I was a bit restless and found myself having multiple conversations about this with my wife about what my future would be. She knows I don't see myself continuing my job and we brainstormed a lot about it. She said : you're a founder, you are not a programmer. (she works in a small SaaS business so she works closely with both).

I`m happy I started reading Unscripted . I believe that over the last few years I buried my dreams of having a successful business and stopped believing in it. Most of my friends are not entrepreneurs and I kind of get sucked in the mediocre mentality for a while. I`m glad MJ woke me up abruptly. I have to break out of the "Comfort" box (other thread by MJ about boxes) AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, as well as a few others.
I now realize it's now or never. I can't wait another 10 years and be miserable and complain about my company etc. Nobody is coming to save my. If I`m not saving myself, nobody will. I know that if I set my mind to something, I will eventually find a way. Time for action !

 

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